Peter Saul, From Pop to Punk @ Venus Over Manhattan, NYC

Peter Saul, From Pop to Punk
Venus Over Manhattan, New York
February 25 - April 25, 2015

VENUS OVER MANHATTAN presents From Pop to Punk, paintings from the ’60s and ’70s by renowned painter PETER SAUL.

Peter Saul’s politically charged, and often politically incorrect, paintings are rooted in a system of removal from the artist’s beliefs, void of morals and ambivalent in their politics. Peter Saul sources imagery from popular culture and current and historical events for his cartoonish and surreal depictions. The resulting paintings of the grotesque are more akin to social commentary than clear political statements.

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Peter Saul settled in Paris in the late ’50s after completing his studies at California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis. Peter Saul is often associated with the Chicago Imagists, a group of artists typically defined by their Post-War tradition of fantasy-based art-making rooted in surrealism, pop culture, and the grotesque, as well as the Funk Artists of the San Francisco Bay Area. Like the Imagists and Funk Artists, Peter Saul chose to work outside of the confines of the New York art scene, instead embracing humor in a time of stark seriousness.

Predating Pop Art, Peter Saul’s Sex Boat, 1961, is expressionist and loosely rendered, depicting banal everyday objects as a direct response to the existentialist beliefs of Abstract Expressionism. Peter Saul’s paintings from the late ’60s and early ’70s, on the other hand, are more vibrantly colored, technically refined and illustrative. An exhibition highlight, Crucifixion of Angela Davis, 1973, depicts Davis as a green, contorted, monstrous figure strung about a wooden cross, stabbed with knives that read “JEEZ US,” “JEEZ IS,” and “JEE SIS”. A prominent counterculture leader of the ’60s associated with both human rights and violent activism, Davis remains a controversial political figure. These are the images that Peter Saul is drawn to – “pictures with problems.”

Peter Saul has exhibited his work internationally and throughout the United States. Peter Saul’s work appears in numerous museum collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.

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