Tuesday Edition: Gary Petersen
Squeeze
10"x8" ($20) | 14"x11" ($50) | 20"x16" ($200) | 40"x30" ($2000)
by
Gary Petersen
Snuffly Tuesday greetings, collectors! A cold is making its way around JBP HQ. Our technical (not to mention photographic) hero Raul was the first to fall, and I awoke this morning craving tea not coffee, always the clearest indicator of cold-affliction for me. Luckily, Team 20x200 is well-accustomed to working virtually — a little fuzzy-headedness isn't going to break our stride! We've got an excellent array of editions lined up this week — thinking and writing about them is a lovely way to pass the time as I'm bundled up on my couch, sipping the aforementioned tea. Once I'm done with today's introduction, I can use this idle(ish) time to catch up on some vital inbox-clearing and web-surfing.
It might be hard to imagine that web-surfing is vital, but for a curator like me, it absolutely is. Today's edition, Squeeze, is a case in point. I'm always on the look out for new artists, and as I mentioned when introducing Shaun Sundholm's edition last week, I find lots of inspired art on the internet. In fact, I connected with today's edition-maker, painter Gary Petersen, via Facebook which is sort of the internet. AOL-nouveau or not, I've been addicted to Fb since joining the party (late) last summer, in part because I found a surprisingly large artworld contingent within its pearly gates.*
Back in January, one of the 94 friends that Gary and I have in common posted an announcement for Linear Abstraction, a group exhibition that included Gary's gorgeous paintings, using one of his images to accompany their post. I was instantly smitten with the work for the typical Jen-Bekman-is-gonna-love-this reasons: the colors and the crisp, almost graphic, quality of the image combined to create an exuberance that leaped off the screen and into my heart. I love work that makes my heart race, and Gary's paintings do just that.
I went digging beneath the surface — and beyond my gut reaction — and things just kept getting better. Like many of the artists that I work with, Gary's a grown-up. He's a practicing artist who maintains a studio at the marvelous Elizabeth Arts Foundation and his exhibition history is impressive. He's had critically acclaimed solo shows, and has participated in group exhibitions curated by some of my favorite gallerists.
Gary's paintings, described by critic Stephen Maine as "so familiar to observers of New York abstraction", certainly evoke the spirit of giants, but they possess a velocity and energy that's unique. Maine's review of Gary's solo exhibition at Michael Steinberg Fine Arts, published in Art in America in April 2006, does a wonderful job of describing the elements that give the paintings the human quality I value so much in artwork. I'll close today's newsletter with Mr. Maine's insightful analysis:
As in the paintings of Mary Heilmann and Joanne Greenbaum, the components Petersen works with are familiar and somewhat generic but their orchestration is singular. Not slick, actually a little fumbling, these paintings do not attempt to hide a certain awkwardness and vulnerability behind their sunny bravado, which makes them resoundingly human.
*Why on earth Facebook is where they gravitated, and what they find (or don't find) there is the topic of a whole other conversation...
Jen Bekman Projects is hiring!....
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