Marking the
artist’s first New York museum survey, this exhibition will bring together
approximately sixty paintings from across his long career.
Beginning
in the early 1960s, Peter Saul began to incorporate imagery borrowed from a
range of pop-cultural sources into his exuberant, brightly colored paintings,
adopting a style that has proven to be far ahead of its time. His work
developed independently from concurrent art historical movements like Pop art,
with which it shares some superficially similar concerns. Instead of the cool
detachment of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, however, Saul crafted his own
unique blend of Surrealism, history painting, vernacular illustration, and the
real-life shock and horror of current events. This madcap formula has allowed
the artist to critique art historical pretensions while addressing the outsized
characters and realities of his day. Long considered outside the narrative of
twentieth-century art, Peter Saul’s work has gained greater appreciation as
younger artists register his influence in work across mediums.
Saul’s
earliest paintings, which he created in Paris, demonstrate a loose, gestural
style of abstraction, yet he began to incorporate text, recognizable
characters, and consumer products into his works as early as 1960. Around this
time, he plucked figures like Donald Duck and Superman from the pages of comic
books and deposited them into chaotic scenes representative of the avarice and
violence of America. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Saul created some of
his most shocking and indelible works in response to the Vietnam War, with a
series that captured the conflict’s grotesque brutality, racism, and
destruction. A later group of paintings, which examines the chaotic
sociopolitical fabric of urban life in California, reflects the dissolution of 1960s
counterculture and the corruption, racism, and greed of US politics.
Saul
extended his interrogation of American history in his portraits of infamous
criminals like John Wayne Gacy, archetypes like cowboys and businessmen, and US
presidents such as Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, whom Saul
depicts with disdain and condemnation. He has also looked further back to
reimagine supposedly triumphant scenes from America’s past—including Columbus’s
arrival in America, Washington crossing the Delaware, and Custer’s Last Stand—as
moments of comical failure or disgrace. With a caustic sense of humor, Saul has
continuously skewered America’s leaders, rendering their stretched, distorted
bodies in Day-Glo colors. His disparate influences range from MAD magazine
comics to Surrealist fantasies and American social realist painting from the 1930s.
With its
embrace of vernacular culture, Saul’s work stands as a key link between young
figurative painters and older groups of artists like the Hairy Who in Chicago
and the Bay Area Funk artists, who similarly operated outside the dominant
critical modes of their time. Historically, his work also connects to the
Surrealist landscapes of Salvador Dalí and Roberto Matta, and to the biting
political caricatures of artists such as Francisco Goya and William Hogarth. Often
championed by West Coast artists like Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Saul’s work,
pushed for so long to the margins of the art world, now proves to be a perfect
expression of our horrific present.
This
exhibition is curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Edlis Neeson Artistic Director,
and Gary Carrion-Murayari, Kraus Family Curator.
Details
Event
website: http://www.newmuseum.org
Static map
showing venue location
Venue name:New
Museum of Contemporary Art
Address:235
Bowery
New York, 10002
Cross
street:at Prince St
