Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Suburbia, Paintings and Drawings, 1965-1969
George Adams Gallery, New York
February 13 – March 27, 2004

The George Adams Gallery presents Peter Saul: Suburbia, a selection of works by Peter Saul dating from 1965-1969. Upon his return from an 8-year sojourn in Europe, Saul, who was born in San Francisco, settled in Mill Valley, California in 1965.  From 1965 until approximately 1972, Peter Saul produced a series of works that featured images of Northern California suburbia--modern homes, cars, roads, the Golden Gate Bridge, and palm trees -- rendered in the artist's characteristic Day-Glo colors and cartoon inflected style.

Peter Saul: Suburbia features 10 related drawings and one large-scale painting. Produced at the same time as the protest paintings, which garnered Saul a reputation as a political painter, the suburbia series present the banality of Saul's everyday surroundings as a source of social critique. As David Zack observed in his 1969 Artnews article "That's Saul, Folks," "[In] Saul's new series of suburban houses the color and outline keep the scene from seeming macabre.  It is more the dispassionate humor of Magritte than the hysteria of Ensor." Included in the current exhibition, for example, is Suburban House II, c. 1969, which depicts an inter-connected community of luxury modern homes rendered in electric pinks and greens, while Suburban Houses I, with similar imagery, has the addition of real-estate values prominently noted next to each house.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is Upper Class Lower Class, 1966, a canvas that juxtaposes a superhero couple and a suburbanite couple, surrounded by roads leading nowhere, bridges made of dollar and cent symbols, and rainbow colored houses and buildings.  With a trenchant observation of the social and economic disparity between San Francisco and wealthier Marin County just over the Golden Gate Bridge, Saul plays out his critique in a cartoonish slightly grotesque style.  Other works echo this theme, including two drawings Cash, 1967-68 and Marfak, 1965 which focus on California's car culture with images of gas stations and gas guzzling automobiles.

Three of the works also include extraneous drawing a revealing look at Peter Saul's compositional and conceptual process. In Modern Home ABCD, c. 1966, for example, a red Gumby figure foregrounds a fully rendered cut-away view of a suburban home, which is flanked by a swimming pool, a tree-house, and a low flying airplane all drawn in faint pencil. Similarly, Modern Home, c. 1969, shifts between simple line drawing and full color depicting several homes all architecturally styled on stilts to accommodate "the view" from a hill or ocean bluff. With characteristic humor and wit, Peter Saul's modern homes reveal the illogical construction of high-style Marin County architecture.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com