© The Estate of Peter Laszlo Péri

Peter Peri, grandson of Peter Laszlo Péri and manager of the artist's estate, has written: 'Péri’s early Constructivist works aimed to capture the dynamic forces of the cosmos for use in the coming Communist society. They were conceived as large as 17 metres across and also as small postcard sized photo collages. Shifts in scale are a perennial theme in his later Realist work and during the 1940s and 50s he produced literally hundreds of his ‘Little People’ series. In different coloured concrete the sculptures aim to capture emotion and character with a minimal touch through body poses and attitudes. He considered these modest figures to be his most significant achievement as an artist - they are a kind of index of his accumulated formal ideas and observations sketched from life'. Marxist critic Francis Klingender described Peri’s work as exhibiting a ‘rigorous economy of sculptural form. All superflous detail is omitted and the content is vitalised [...] by being reduced to its essential elements.’