Charley Peters is a painter and public artist exploring how the visual languages of digital culture can be reimagined through painting, space and material form.
Charley Peters is a painter and public artist based in Lewes and London. Her work explores the strange objects and environments that emerge from contemporary image technologies, from computer graphics and simulation environments to AI-generated imagery. Drawing on these visual languages alongside traditions of modernist abstraction and still life, her paintings translate synthetic images into material form, creating hybrid spaces where digital illusion and painterly construction collide.
She has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, including recent presentations at Meakin + Parsons, Oxford; Kelly McKenna Gallery, New Jersey; Hauser & Wirth, London; Z20 Sara Zanin Gallery, Rome; Yantai Art Museum, China; and the National Museum of Gdańsk, Poland.
Her work has been commissioned for public spaces and cultural institutions including Facebook, Wembley Park, Hospital Rooms, ITV and London Art Fair.
Peters holds a PhD in Fine Art Theory and Practice and has written on contemporary painting for publications including Instantloveland, Turps Banana, A-N and Abstract Critical. She is Head of Graduate School at City & Guilds of London Art School, a visiting mentor at Turps Art School, and a Senior Lecturer and PhD Supervisor at University of the Arts London.
BETWEEN THE SCREEN AND THE SURFACE:
Artworks that remix digital culture into a space of perception and possibility.
My work explores how painting can translate the visual language of digital culture into physical space.
I grew up in Birmingham, a concrete metropolis lit by sodium streetlights and neon shop signs. Much of my childhood was spent drawing imagined spaces, building alternate worlds out of paper, colour and cheap felt-tip pens. My early visual language came from pixelated video games, sci-fi book covers and the glow of television screens. Technology was everywhere, but it still felt slightly magical.
That fascination with constructed images has never really left me. I’m interested in how visual culture is shaped by the systems that produce it, from the perspectival logic of Renaissance painting to the computational logic of contemporary image systems. Today, computer graphics, simulation tools and generative image technologies form part of my studio process, not as shortcuts but as speculative sketching tools. They allow me to explore strange or impossible objects before translating them back into the slower, more resistant language of paint.
My paintings often appear hyperreal from a distance: metallic forms hover in space, geometric structures intersect with luminous gradients, and surfaces seem digitally rendered. Up close, the illusion begins to dissolve into brushstrokes, glazes and material gestures. I’m interested in that moment of perceptual slippage, where the viewer moves between recognising the visual language of synthetic images and becoming aware of the physical construction of the painting itself.
In this sense, the work often begins with simulated imagery but ultimately returns to painting as a material process. Translating synthetic images into paint allows their hyperreal surfaces to become unstable again, shifting between digital precision and painterly uncertainty.
Although painting sits at the centre of my practice, the work frequently expands beyond the canvas. I’m interested in how pictorial space can migrate into the physical world through murals, public commissions, sculptural installations and collaborative projects that bring painting into dialogue with architecture, technology and design. These works test how the visual languages of the screen behave when they occupy real space, where scale, movement and embodied experience come into play.
Across these different contexts, I think of painting less as a fixed medium and more as a system for organising images and attention. It is a way of asking how we see, how we interpret visual information, and how meaning is constructed through form, colour and composition.
The studio remains the centre of that exploration. Like the imagined worlds I drew as a child, it is a place where images can be built, dismantled and rebuilt again; a space for testing how painting might continue to operate within a culture increasingly shaped by synthetic images and screen-based realities.