Peter Laszlo Péri (né Laszlo Weisz) was born in Budapest, Hungary on 13 June 1899, into a large proletarian Jewish family. Following a bricklaying apprenticeship, he began studying fine art, then architecture, in Budapest in 1919 at the Hungarian Soviet’s Proletarian Art Workshops. In 1920 he moved first to Paris, then, banished due to his political activities, to Vienna, finally settling in Berlin (probably very late) in 1920, where he became a member of the Communist party and created his first geometric reliefs. In 1922 and 1923 he exhibited with Moholy-Nagy at Der Sturm Galerie in Berlin – the pair were often mentioned as the Hungarian Constructivist duo in Berlin by El Lissitzky, Hans Richter and others and their first exhibition preceded the first Russian Art Show at Van Diemen gallery by several months, positioning both artists as pioneers of Constructivism outside Russia (Péri, the more heavily promoted artist, also could be said to have given proletarian legitimacy to Moholy, whose bourgeois family background was sometimes regarded with suspicion). Péri also participated in a group show in 1924 with Nell Walden and the architect Ludwig Hilberseimer, exhibiting Constructivist artworks alongside his new Productivist/architectural works.
In 1933, Péri immigrated to England after his wife, Mary Macnaghten (granddaughter of social reformer Charles Booth) was arrested for possession of Communist propaganda. In Britain, Péri contributed to the constructivist movement by producing irregularly shaped wall reliefs, opening up new planes and discovering concrete as a potential sculptural medium, which he manipulated to great effect. He exhibited concrete works in 1934 at the newly-founded Left-wing Artists’ International Association (AIA) exhibition 'The Social Scene' and made contact with anti-Nazi photomontagist John Heartfield, followed in 1938 by a solo show entitled 'London Life in Concrete', sponsored by the Cement and Concrete Association. In 1951 he contributed a piece entitled 'The Sunbathers' (formerly thought lost, now restored and on display in Waterloo) to the Festival of Britain and created many public sculptures and reliefs for schools and universities including 'Man of the World' (1959) for Devonshire House at the University of Exeter. Peter Laszlo Péri died in London, England on 19 January 1967. A joint exhibition, 'László Moholy-Nagy / Laszlo Peri', was held at the Graphisches Kabinett, Bremen in 1987 and a retrospective was held at Leicestershire Museums in 1991. Péri's work is held in numerous collections including The Arts Council, the British Museum, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, Tate, MOMA, New York and the Pompidou, Paris.
