Peter and Sally Saul @ Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton

Through 13 November 2022

Michael Werner Gallery, East Hampton presents Peter and Sally Saul, an exhibition of works on paper by Peter Saul and ceramic works by Sally Saul. Both artists specifically created and selected the mostly new works for this joint exhibition, where their work is shown together for the first time in many years.

Since his first solo exhibition in 1961, PETER SAUL (b. 1934) has exhibited throughout the world. His paintings are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Recent important exhibitions include Peter Saul at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs in Toulouse and Le Delta in Namur, and his first retrospective in New York, Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum. Paul Saul’s first extensive monograph was published by Rizzoli in Fall 2021.

SALLY SAUL (b. 1946) has shown her work extensively for over three decades in solo exhibitions and group shows throughout the United States and internationally. Her first survey Blue Hills, Yellow Tree, bringing together three decades of work, was held at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, New York in 2019. Sally Saul is represented by Venus over Manhattan. Solo exhibitions include Sally Saul at Almine Rech, Paris in 2020, and at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York in 2020/21.  Her work has been shown at other venues including Jeffrey Deitch, New York; the Art Museum of West Virginia, Morgantown, WV; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; White Columns, New York; and Lumber Room, Portland, OR.

Both artists live and work in Germantown, New York.

MICHAEL WERNER EAST HAMPTON

50 Newtown Lane, East Hampton, NY 11937

www.michaelwerner.com

Peter and Sally Saul

Michael Werner East Hampton

24 August - 13 November 2022

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Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson, Peter Saul @ Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York - Parallel Phenomena

Parallel Phenomena

Works on Paper by Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson and Peter Saul

Curated by Damon Brandt

Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York

May 13 – June 26, 2021

Parallel Phenomena compares and contrasts the distinct yet related worlds these four artists have constructed and woven into being with graphite, colored pencil and watercolor. Every paper surface becomes the territory for a series of eccentrically fueled and compulsively composed narratives, each distinguished by a level of figurative distortion that bears the unmistakable signature of its author. By exploring the compositional and conceptual connective tissue among the works of Carroll Dunham, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Gladys Nilsson and Peter Saul, one can trace the mysterious phenomena of unorchestrated communal responses to deeply held individual impulses or needs. Through this clarifying process one can simultaneously highlight individual inspiration and celebrate the shared instincts and aesthetic parallels.

A premeditated subtext to this exhibition is the inclusion of the self-taught King with her credentialed and academically trained contemporaries. There is a storied legacy of more comprehensive exhibitions that have examined the complex intersection between artists on the periphery and those in the mainstream, including Lynn Cooke’s Outliers and American Vanguard Art (National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, 2018), Massimiliano Gioni’s Encyclopedic Palace (Venice Biennial, 2013) and Maurice Tuchman’s Parallel Visions: Modern Artists and Outsider Art (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1992). Resulting questions abound: Who are Insiders or Outsiders? What, if any, is the relationship between self-imposed solitude versus genetically driven isolation, and ultimately, how does one activate a curatorial consciousness that, to quote Cooke, is not subservient to “the determination of the socially empowered agents, institutions and discourse that evaluate, legitimate and promote.” That King never had access to university instruction or knowledge of art historical conventions yet creates work that stands in the company of renowned contemporary artists is testament to the need to further dismantle an ill-informed hierarchy.

Susan Te Kahurangi King (b. 1951) is from New Zealand and began to draw at the age of four with an extraordinary sense of purpose that continued around the same time she lost her ability to speak. Surrounded by a large immediate family, she worked under a nurturing umbrella of support, producing hundreds of works on paper before enduring a painfully long and mysterious period of inactivity that lasted sixteen years. When King again resumed her creative output, which she continues to this day at seventy, she virtually picked up where she had left off. With a newfound gravitation to brightly colored felt pens a stylistic shift ensued, her works becoming less labyrinthian in content, and even more abstract in nature, almost exuberant, and awash in vibrant color. This exhibition features a fresh trove of works produced from 1965 to 1984 along with a cache of more recent drawings made between 2008 and 2016.

From the intimacy of Dunham’s diaristic multiple datings of his creative process to Nilsson’s topsy-turvy matrix of intersecting worlds; from Saul’s bug-eyed manic testimonials on the vagaries of human behavior to King’s exquisite tumble of twisted cartoon characters moving through space, each of these artists speaks actively and equally to each other’s authenticity and shared internal geography.

In an effusive Vulture review, art critic and writer Jerry Saltz described his discovery of King at the 2014 New York Outsider Art Fair, where Chris Byrne presented her work alongside Peter Saul’s, and noted King’s “strange abstract combinations or knitted- together landscapes of cartoon parts… arranged in ways that echo Willem de Kooning, Jim Nutt’s meticulous piecing together of body parts and distortion, Roy Lichtenstein’s stylized cartooning, and Carroll Dunham’s deft space and line.” Peter Saul and Gladys Nilsson have thus been recruited along with Dunham in this comparative playground of figurative angst and personal fantasy. Nilsson has an interesting association with Outsider Art as the preeminent collector of the drawings of Martín Ramirez. Her work was also included in the aforementioned exhibitions Outliers and Parallel Visions.

Whether trained or untrained, quiet or boisterous, a re-imagined world is the province of all artists. Parallel Phenomena celebrates both the organically channeled and the strategically engineered and identifies the intersecting language between the two. While each artist merits careful individual consideration, it is within the company of these kindred spirits that potent connections can be wrought and respectfully illuminated.

DAMON BRANDT is a writer and curatorial consultant based in New York City. He opened his first gallery in 1984 with a contemporary exhibition program while pursuing his expertise in ancient tribal cultures. 20th century photography has become an additional area of focus. In 1992, he founded Salt Mine Projects as a natural extension of his wide- ranging collaborative activities both within and outside of the art world.

CAROLL DUNHAM (b. 1949) was born in New Haven, CT and attended Trinity College in Hartford. His work has been featured in numerous solo gallery exhibitions including at Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels (2020, 2018, 2015, 2012), Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, (2017, 2012, 2010) and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zürich (2019, 2016, 2014), as well as solo museum exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum (2014), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2009) and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002). His work is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Dunham is represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels, and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles.

SUSAN TE KAHURANGI KING (b. 1951) is a self-taught artist from New Zealand. Her work has been featured in numerous solo gallery exhibitions including at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York (2017, 2014), Robert Heald Gallery, Wellington, New Zealand (2019, 2015), Marlborough Contemporary, London (2017), Intuit, Chicago (2019), and ICA Miami (2016). Her drawings are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the American Folk Art Museum, New York; Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami; and Chartwell Collection, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki. King is represented by Andrew Edlin Gallery in the United States and Robert Heald Gallery in New Zealand.

GLADYS NILSSON (b. 1940) was born in Chicago and studied painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where has been a professor since 1990. She first came to prominence in 1966, when she joined five other recent Art Institute graduates (Jim Falconer, Art Green, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca, and Karl Wirsum) for the first of a series of group exhibitions called the Hairy Who. In 1973, she became one of the first women to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her current solo exhibition, Out of this World, is on view through June 6 th at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin. She has had numerous solo gallery exhibitions including at Garth Greenan, New York (2020, 2017, 2014), Matthew Marks Gallery, New York (2020), Parker Gallery, Los Angeles (2020), Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago (2019), Jean Albano Gallery, Chicago (2012, 2009, 2005, 2003, 2001, 1998), Luise Ross Gallery, New York (2008), and Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia (2002). Her work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Morgan Library; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Gladys Nilsson is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

PETER SAUL (b. 1934) was born in San Francisco where he attended the California School of Fine Arts. He was also a student at the Washington University School of Fine Arts in St. Louis. Concurrent exhibitions entitled New Paintings are currently on view at Venus Over Manhattan and Michael Werner Gallery in New York. His solo exhibition, Crime and Punishment, was on view in 2020 at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Solo gallery exhibitions include Mary Boone Gallery, New York (2017, 2015, 2013, 2012), Michael Werner Gallery, New York (2021, 2020, 2016), Venus Over Manhattan, New York (2021, 2015), David Kordansky, Los Angeles (2015) and eleven shows at Allan Frumkin Gallery and Frumkin/Adams Gallery, both in New York, between 1961 and 1994. His work is in the permanent collections of numerous museums including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington DC; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Peter Saul is represented by Venus Over Manhattan, New York, and Michael Werner Gallery, New York.

ANDREW EDLIN GALLERY

212 Bowery, New York, NY 10012

www.edlingallery.com

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Peter Saul: Fake News @ Mary Boone Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Fake News
Mary Boone Gallery, New York
9 September - 4 November 2017

Mary Boone Gallery presents, at its Chelsea location, Fake News, an exhibition of new paintings by PETER SAUL.

Peter Saul has maintained his over sixty-year career as an affront to good taste, political correctness, and Academic standards. His unmistakable paintings mash elements of Pop, Surrealism, comics, editorial cartoons, and adolescent doodles – they break down preconceptions of serious art and are impossible to forget. Peter Saul’s high esteem among both his peers and much younger artists comes from this enduring conviction to define on his own terms what constitutes the appropriate subject matter and style for painting.

In the current exhibition, Peter Saul tackles art history and its celebrities, as well as a present-day aspirant and his conundrums. Rembrandt’s 1642 masterpiece is re-imagined as an unthreatening militia of costumed ducks in Nightwatch II (2016), Gainsborough’s beloved portrait subject cools off in Blue Boy with Ice Cream Cone (2017), and the Texas Revolution takes a gruesome turn in Return to the Alamo (2017). Donald Trump in Florida (2017) and Quack-Quack, Trump (2017) depict US presiding President in a variety of ignoble situations, oblivious to the imminent catastrophe presented in Global Warming, the Last Beer (2017).

Peter Saul’s send-up of politics and former United States presidents is a highlight of the first comprehensive survey exhibition in Europe of his work that is being held at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, from 2 June through 3 September 2017.

MARY BOONE GALLERY
745 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10151
www.maryboonegallery.com

Nut Art Movement @ Parker Gallery, Los Angeles - Inaugural Exhibition

Nut Art

Parker Gallery, Los Angeles

May 28 – August 5, 2017

Parker Gallery presents its inaugural exhibition, Nut Art, featuring works by Robert Arneson, Betty Bailey, Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Hannah Greely, Calvin Marcus, Maija Peeples-Bright, Benjamin Reiss, Peter Saul, Sally Saul, Harold Schlotzhauer, Richard Shaw, Irvin Tepper, Chris Unterseher and Franklin Williams.

Nut Art is a movement founded in the late 1960s by five Northern California artists: Clayton Bailey, Roy De Forest, David Gilhooly, Maija Peeples-Bright (then Maija Zack, aka Maija Woof) and David Zack. Legend has it, the group was at Roy De Forest’s “purple house under the golden hills of Port Costa, California…looking out the window at some horses and drinking Swan Lager beer.” David Zack, an arts writer and correspondence artist, was searching for a new movement; something that might be an artists’ answer to the Funk moniker adopted by curator Peter Selz. “Roy’s mother Oma came up with a round tray full of open brown bottles of Swan Lager, plus some vegetarian bacon crisps. Everyone said Nut Art at once. Nut Art was born.”(1)

A few Nut Art exhibitions shortly followed, including one organized by Clayton Bailey in 1972 at California State University Hayward. For the exhibition’s staple-bound catalog, De Forest wrote what is commonly referred to as the Nut Art manifesto. The manifesto declares, in all caps:

“THE WORK OF A PECULIAR AND ECCENTRIC NUT CAN TRULY BE CALLED ‘NUT ART’… THE NUT ARTIFICER TRAVELS IN A PHANTASMAGORIC MICRO-WORLD, SMALL AND EXTREMELY COMPACT, AS IS THE LIGHT OF A DWARF STAR IMPLODING INWARD AND IN PASSAGE COLLAPSING PARADISE AND HELL TO ONE AS IT VANISHES FOREVER WITH OUR JOYS, SORROWS AND UNREQUITED LOVE.”(2)

Nut Art at Parker Gallery brings artists from Clayton Bailey’s 1972 exhibition together with contemporary artists who help reveal that the spirit of Nut Art is alive and well. Nut Art includes 10 works from the original exhibition, many of which have not been publicly exhibited since 1972.

(1) David Zack, “Basic Art,” unpublished manuscript, c.1971, 120–21.

(2) Nut Art (Hayward, Calif.: California State University, Hayward, Art Gallery, 1972), n.p.

PARKER GALLERY

2441 Glendower Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90027

www.parkergallery.com

Peter Saul: from Pop to Politics, CB1-G Gallery, Los Angeles

Peter Saul: from Pop to Politics
CB1-G Gallery, Los Angeles
January 7 – February 18, 2017

George Adams Gallery, New York presents an exhibition of paintings and drawings by Peter Saul at CB1-G in Los Angeles. The exhibition features 20 works made between 1957 and 1967 covering his development as an artist from the late 1950s through his transition from Pop in the early 1960’s to a politically engaged, topical artist whose works tackled the most pressing issues of the day in the later half of the decade.

Having spent most of the early 1960’s working in Paris, Peter Saul claimed to have been largely unaware of the Pop Art movement, unfamiliar with the artists most typically associated with it. But critics reviewing his first exhibitions in New York and Chicago recognized him as a Pop artist though without the cool detachment preferred by most of Pop’s other practitioners. As Ellen Johnson pointed wrote in her 1964 catalogue essay: “Where Lichtenstein appears to be amused and Warhol indifferent, Saul is angry…” And indeed he was – increasingly so.

Returning to the San Francisco Bay Area from Paris in late 1964, Peter Saul’s work noticeably shifted to images of war, gradually displacing images from comics and the like. Soon his work was dominated by the war in Vietnam and topical social issues, such as civil rights. Increasingly Saul was dismissed by some critics as a ‘political’ artist, which only encouraged him, believing as he did that if what he was doing provoked the ‘tastemakers’ then he must be on the right track. As the artist wrote in 1967, “Now I think I have…paintings that could prohibit a sophisticated response. Not just because of ‘obscenity,’ which is prevalent, but because it is coupled with politics. I am polarizing things, want to see good and bad.”

The exhibition begins chronologically with a group of pastels, including a self-portrait. They were made in 1957, while Peter Saul lived in Holland and demonstrate an early interest in distortion and the grotesque. In addition there are several paintings and drawings from the early 60’s dating to Peter Saul’s time in Paris, including Ice Box #3 (1961), Gun Moll (1962), and Untitled (Superman) (1963). Examples of the later more political work include New China a large drawing from 1965, and the politically charged lithograph GI On a Cross and large canvas, I Torture Commy Virgins, both from 1967.

CB1 GALLERY
1923 Street Santa Fe Avenue, Los Angeles
www.cb1gallery.com

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
531 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Some Terrible Problems @ Michael Werner Gallery, London

Peter Saul: Some Terrible Problems
Michael Werner Gallery, London
23 September - 5 November 2016

Michael Werner Gallery, London, presents Some Terrible Problems, an exhibition of new paintings by American artist Peter Saul. This is the first London exhibition by Peter Saul, who remains a vital presence in American painting through more than fifty years.

Peter Saul was born in San Francisco in 1934. Following his studies at the California School of Fine Arts and Washington University, St. Louis, he settled for six years in Paris, an unusual choice for a young artist at a time when New York City was the place to be. Saul has remained something of an outsider ever since. Neither a believer in the promise of abstraction, nor a disciple of the Existentialist philosophies underlying the artspeak of the day, Peter Saul remained true to his personal influences and obsessions: French academic painting, MAD magazine, artists such as Paul Cadmus and Rosa Bonheur. Peter Saul embraced narrative and figuration in painting when painting was supposed to be non-objective (if one didn’t already believe painting to be dead). His ironic and caustic humour, love of the grotesque and dogged insistence on the necessity of a picture to tell a story, have left him at odds with every dominant style and “-ism” of the past five decades. Peter Saul has developed into a profound history painter whose ambivalent politics and lurid imagery further complicate the reception of his painting. Consequently, he has long existed outside the canon of acceptable contemporary artists, a radical fringe figure who nonetheless exerts profound influence on younger artists.  

In 1967, Peter Saul said, “Not to be shocking means to agree to be furniture”. This statement outlines the exceptional attitude with which Saul gleefully skewers the conventions of world politics and culture. “Pictures with problems” are Peter Saul’s abiding interest. Some Terrible Problems features seven new large-scale canvases, each dissecting to humorous, gruesome and often offensive effect a range of subjects and attitudes. These remarkable new works revisit genres of history painting and portraiture while remaining thoroughly contemporary and visually unlike anything else in recent painting.

Since his first solo exhibition, in Chicago in 1961, Peter Saul has exhibited his work throughout the United States and internationally. His works are found in numerous museum collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Saul lives and works in New York.

The exhibition is accompanied by a full-colour catalogue featuring an interview between Peter Saul and artist Joe Bradley. 

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY
22 Upper Brook Street, London W1K 7PZ
michaelwerner.com

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.

VENUS OVER MANHATTAN
980 Madison Avenue, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10075
venusovermanhattan.com

Peter Saul: Radical Figure, Paintings and Drawings from the 1960s and 1970s, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Radical Figure, Paintings and Drawings from the 1960s and 1970s 
George Adams Gallery, New York 
April 4 – May 31, 2013 

George Adams Gallery presents PETER SAUL: RADICAL FIGURE, an exhibition featuring 20 paintings and drawings from the 1960s and 1970s.

Peter Saul: Radical Figure traces Saul’s career from his involvement with Pop-Art in the early 1960s to his tackling of contemporary political subjects in the later 1960s and “art about art” in the 1970s. While his Pop and political works were intentionally provocative, even this last series could be surprisingly controversial: In 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s acquisition committee was horrified by Peter Saul’s 10-foot long version of Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (they acquired his “View of San Francisco #2,” 1986, instead).

Notable in the exhibition are a number of paintings never before or only rarely exhibited: “Gun Moll” and “Valda Sherman” both from 1961, “Girl #2,” 1962, (paired in the exhibition with “Girl #1” from the same year), and “California Artist,” 1973, (a portrait of William T. Wiley featured in Saul’s exhibition at Allan Frumkin Gallery, Chicago, that same year). Seldom or never exhibited works on paper include “Toobs,” 1963, “New China #1,” 1965, “Tuff Sister,” 1970, and studies for “Picasso’s Guernica,” 1976, “Nightwatch,” 1977, and “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” 1978.

Peter Saul has been the subject of four comprehensive museum retrospective exhibitions in the United States and abroad. He has exhibited regularly with this gallery since 1960, as well as with other galleries in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Paris, and Geneva. His work is in numerous museum collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul, Fondation Salomon, Alex

Peter Saul
Fondation Salomon, Alex
14 juillet - 11 novembre 2012

Figure singulière de la scène artistique américaine, longtemps incompris voire rejeté par la critique de son pays, Peter Saul crée depuis plus de 50 ans une peinture libre et pétulante, à la fois violente et réjouissante.

La finesse d’exécution et la subtilité de sa technique contrastent avec l’exubérance de ses figures déformées et désarticulées aux yeux exorbités. Ses tableaux « pop-surréalistes » aux couleurs acides et rutilantes mêlent joyeusement sans hiérarchie comics, sitcoms, cinéma gore et histoire de l’art. Avec une touche revendiquée de mauvais goût et sans tabou, Peter Saul se saisit de la réalité de la société américaine et nous renvoie une image à la fois parodique et désespérante de l’humanité.

L’exposition de la fondation Salomon porte sur les vingt dernières années de production de Peter Saul. Elle rassemble une quarantaine de tableaux issus de collections en Europe et aux Etats-Unis autour de thématiques récurrentes dans son oeuvre : l’histoire de l’art, la politique et l’histoire américaines, le monde des affaires, la religion…

L’exposition présente également un ensemble d’une quinzaine d’oeuvres sur papier ainsi qu’une sélection de carnets de dessins.

Peter Saul est né en 1934 à San Francisco, Californie. Il vit et travaille dans l'Etat de New York.

A paraître: un catalogue bilingue français/anglais, édité par la fondation Salomon, texte de Erik Verhagen.

PETER SAUL

Catalogue de l'exposition

Fondation Salomon, 2012

Fondation pour l’art contemporain Salomon 
191, route du château, 74290 Alex
www.fondation-salomon.com

Peter Saul: Sheer Terror, Nolan Judin, Berlin

Peter Saul: Sheer Terror
Nolan Judin, Berlin
13 March – 24 April 2010

The exhibition "Peter Saul: Sheer Terror" — ten large-format paintings and a selection of works on paper — provides insight into the 75 year-old Provocateur-in-Chief's work over the last decade. His undiminished influence on both younger and more established fellow artists marks him out as one of the most important painters to emerge in America after World War II. No subject is too taboo for him, no personality deserving of so much respect, that they cannot become subjects of his polemical and violent paintings. Despite the aggressive and acerbic tone of most of his art, by nature, Peter Saul is reserved, sensi­tive, and thoughtful, which is reflected in the rather old fash­ioned artists who he admires, like Caillebotte, Cadmus, Ensor, Beckmann. An avid museum and gallery goer, Peter Saul goes to see as much painting as he can in New York and on his travels. He learns from what he sees to create bells and whistles with paint and canvas to make viewers stop in their tracks at an art exhibition and notice his work.

From 1956 to 1964, Peter Saul went to live in Europe. From afar, he witnessed the rise of Abstract Expressionism and the New York School as the zeitgeist of post-war Amer­ican art. The paint­ings he made in Europe were unlike any­thing else being made at the time. Presaging the American artist, Phillip Guston, they were both expressive and figurative, and featured distinctly unartful motifs such as iceboxes, cars, toilets, and Donald Duck. From today's vantage point it is clear that Peter Saul had established himself as a progenitor of what became widely known as American Pop Art. In late 1950s' Paris he befriended the Chilean surrealist and Abstract Expressionist Roberto Matta and scored his first successes in the "Salon de jeune peinture". His first solo exhibitions were to follow in New York and Chicago in 1961.

Upon his return to America in 1964, Peter Saul's style veered away from the expressive and painterly in favor of a hardedged figurative style featuring distorted anatomy, acidic psychedelic colors, and an allover, chaotic composition that created an animated drama and tension within the frame of the canvas. This highly charged cartoon style served the artist as a means to comment, during the late 1960s and early 1970s, on the profound rift within American society over the Vietnam War and the struggle for racial equality.

Despite the harsh tone of Peter Saul's political paintings, he retained his sense of humor and poked fun at art world personalities, politicians, and notorious celebrities, from nuclear spy Ethel Rosenberg to football star O. J. Simpson, from president Ronald Reagan to financial fraudster Bernie Madoff. Well aware of the importance of the history of portraiture in Western art, Peter Saul satirizes this genre in paintings like "Cold Sweat" (1999) and "Stuck" (2007). History painting is another favorite of Peter Saul's, and this exhibition features "Sardanapulus" (2005), a painting elaborating on Eugène Delacroix's "The Death of Sardanapalus" (1827), though Peter Saul's version takes place 20 minutes after the king's dramatic suicide. "Stalin + Mao" (2009) shows the two men as a superhero duo bashing in the heads of the Germans and the Japanese during World War II. Peter Saul's imagination is also fed by current events, as evident in "Chinese Businessman Lands on Wall Street" (2006), a humorous portrayal of China's rise to the status of an economic superpower.

At the age of 75, Peter Saul continues to transform his own style and technique, creating paintings that are refreshingly contemporary. Recent paintings, like "Viva la Difference" (2008), "Raccoon Artist Surprises the Art World" (2009), "Death by Champagne Cork" (2009), "Manz Best Friend" (2009), and "It's Not Cancer" (2009), feature Peter Saul's irrepressible sense of humor and irony. He approaches life, death, love, and companionship with a keen appreciation for the human condition.

Peter Saul has shown widely throughout Europe and the United States. In 2008, three American institutions—the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in Philadelphia—organized a major and widely noted retrospective of his career. His works can be found in the collections of many museums, among them the Centre George Pompidou and the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Art Institute in Chicago.

Peter Saul currently lives and works in New York.

NOLAN JUDIN BERLIN
Heidestrasse 50, 10557 Berlin
www.nolan-judin.de

Updated 15.07.2019

Peter Saul: New Paintings, David Nolan, NYC

Peter Saul: New Paintings
David Nolan, New York
April 2 – May 23, 2009

“Bad guys are more interesting than good guys,
just like bad news makes better headlines.”
-Peter Saul

David Nolan Gallery presents a solo exhibition of new large scale paintings by Peter Saul, one of America's quintessential painters of the past fifty years, whose works challenge the cool attitude of post war American art with his own brand of heated and sometimes laughable cartoon expressionism. With a forty-year museum retrospective currently traveling, Peter Saul delivers seven new acrylic paintings, created over the last two years that show no signs of quieting down. A continuation of his history paintings and absurd lessons in etiquette, the new works shed an uncompromising light on universal crises: racism, feminism, personal hygiene and the actual victors of World War II. 

Peter Saul spent his early post graduate years in the 1950's abroad, traveling through Holland, Paris and Rome, experimenting with ways to expand upon the possibilities of postwar gesture painting by incorporating various symbols of American mass culture. His sensationalistic paintings of iceboxes, comic strip superheroes and toilets did not fit into New York's ultra cool idea of Pop Art, exemplified by Roy Lichtenstein's Ben-day dots. Peter Saul was inspired by consumerism as a joke. Upon his return to the United States in 1964, he hardened his technique and added saturated color. Armed with a new exterior toughness, he dealt with American politics and culture, seeking the obvious and avoiding any hint of artistic deconstruction. 

Peter Saul established his reputation as an outsider and a troublemaker in San Francisco in the 1960's by painting violent scenes of racism, blood lust and misogyny, unadulterated hallmarks of the Vietnam War, in the midst of flower-child culture. Later that decade, he went on to paint portraits of art world celebrities, including Marcel Duchamp, Frank Stella, Clement Greenberg and his first dealer, Allan Frumkin, all in a spirit of rudeness and psychosexual turmoil. He next pictured leading politicians, most notoriously Nixon and Reagan with the same attitude. Perhaps feeling he'd gone too far in the direction of personal insult, Saul tried to make amends by repainting famous works by the icons of Cubism and Ab-ex, giving these masterworks the gift of cartoony drawing and fluorescent colors. In the 80's and 90's he imagined the punishments of Ethel Rosenberg, John Wayne Gacy and O.J. Simpson, strapping each into an electric chair and giving them the juice. 

At the age of 74, there is still nothing corporate about Peter Saul. He works without assistants, and while he enjoys looking at photographs, he never copies them because that would interfere with his imagination. The recent works are all about the content, exaggerated by the intensity of Peter Saul's palette consisting of countless pre-mixed acrylics, which he builds up patiently with a dry brush technique that feels like graffiti. In "Better than DeKooning" (2008), and "Max Beckman's The Night" (2008) Peter Saul continues his legacy, reimagining the famous series of "Woman" paintings from the 1950's and the German Expressionist masterpiece, "The Night" (1918), intuitively into his own contemporary versions. With the problems of painting out the way, Peter Saul takes license to make adjustments, adding violence, color, and mayhem to the originals.

In August 2008, New York Times critic Holland Cotter described Peter Saul as an artist whose ongoing lack of official recognition is unjust. A long list of artists, famous and less than famous, have paid close attention to Saul's work since 1961, watching him break all of the cultural taboos that paint on canvas can handle. Currently, Saul's third retrospective is traveling the United States; organized by the Orange County Museum of Art with guest curator Dan Cameron, the retrospective debuted at the Orange County Museum of Art, CA (2008), before traveling to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, where it is currently on display. Saul's work has been exhibited widely in the United States and in Europe, and appears in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Whitney Museum of American art, the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the Ludwig Museum, Cologne, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburg, among others.

Peter Saul, New Paintings

Edited by David Nolan

Interview with Peter Saul 

36 pages, softcover, 16 color ill., 8.5 x 11 inches

Published by David Nolan Gallery, 2009.

ISBN 978-0-97717145-3

DAVID NOLAN NEW YORK
527 West 29th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.davidnolangallery.com

Updated 15.07.2019

Peter Saul: Prints and Drawings, 1960-1975, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Prints and Drawings, 1960-1975
George Adams Gallery, New York
February 26 – April 11, 2009

George Adams Gallery will exhibit drawings and prints from 1960 to 1975 by PETER SAUL. The exhibition, which surveys Peter Saul's artistic progression from Pop Art to politics, fills the gallery's two exhibition spaces with 20 works, several of which have never been shown before.

Born in San Francisco in 1934, Peter Saul attended the California School of Fine Arts before earning a degree from the School of Fine Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Over the next nine years, he gained recognition as a Pop artist while living abroad in Holland, France and Italy. Upon his return to the United States and to the Bay Area in 1965 he became increasingly radical and focused on some of the most scorching issues of the Vietnam Era.

The exhibition begins chronologically with two drawings from 1960. One is a rare "Icebox" drawing, possibly one of only two Peter Saul made to complement his series of paintings of the same subject. The exhibition continues with "Superman" from 1961, "Cash" and "Marfak," from 1965, several drawings from his "Mill Valley" series of 1966-67, and "Gud Art," 1970, an outrageous day-glo rendering of Bobby Kennedy entwined with Pat Nixon.

In the Drawing Gallery is a complete set of Peter Saul's political prints, nine in all. "White Sex," from 1966, is a small black and white lithograph and his first on the theme of the Vietnam War. Also included are "Commie Girl," and "GI on the Cross," both from 1967, "Angela Davis" from 1972 and the infamous "Veetnam Amboosh" of 1975.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
525 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Homage to Dalí, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Homage to Dalí
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
February 12 – March 13, 2004

Peter Saul’s work could be described as the product of the collision of challenging visual elements with social and political satire. No subject daunts him. With hearty cheer he assaults taste, violates taboo, and defies convention (sometimes all three within one picture).

Peter Saul is literally and figuratively a man of many parts: a critic of society's crueler preoccupations, a diarist of the vulgar and profane, an appropriator, a history painter, and a provocateur. Peter Saul’s cartoon transgressions are his way of shaking us awake from our quotidian stupor. To those who are offended by his images, he might say, “I’m an optimist. My paintings are pure fantasy. The genuinely appalling things happening in the world are real.”

Peter Saul was born in 1934 and currently lives in upstate New York. After attending art school, he went to Europe, where he lived from 1956 to 1964. His first one man exhibition was in 1961 at Allan Frumkin Gallery in Chicago. This is his fourth exhibition at Nolan Eckman.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

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

Peter Saul: The Sixties, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: The Sixties
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
September 20 – October 26, 2002

In the 1960’s, Peter Saul’s paintings are poised between proto-Pop and Abstract Expressionism. Being an iconoclast, he resolutely avoids being part of either movement. But what a precocious lad he is! Somehow, he gets into the Icebox before Warhol, and then scouts for Guston, who would enter cartoon territory in 1967. Were he a stockbroker, Peter Saul’s prescience with Pop would have the SEC on his tail, pronto.

Featuring works not seen in over 35 years, this exhibition explores the foundations of Peter Saul’s fierce and mischievous artworks. He demonstrates an uncanny rapport with American culture, despite the fact that everything was made while living in Europe. And in many respects, his early work is very much like his current work: Peter Saul continues his ironical investigation of the economic and moral forces that move our society.

A catalogue accompanies the exhibition.

Peter Saul, The Sixties

Edited by David Nolan

Text by Ellen H. Johnson (re-print from 1964)

44 pages, softcover, 10 color ill., 3 b&w; ill.

Published by Nolan/Eckman Gallery, 2002.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

Updated: 16.07.2019

Peter Saul: Heads 1986 - 2000, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Heads 1986 - 2000
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
November 3 – December 9, 2000

Peter Saul’s ruthlessly comic and politically incorrect drawings and paintings begin at the neck and continue maniacally upward, closely documenting quite alarming distortions. As the artist Carroll Dunham notes in his introduction to the show’s accompanying catalogue, “Saul’s visual thermostat is set high—the threshold of his pictorial circuits must blow the fuses of many contemporary eyeballs.”

Peter Saul’s lovingly constructed fantasies slalom through a course of Zap Comix, Pop art, Cubism, and Surrealism. After all, this is an artist whose stated aim is to reconcile de Kooning with Mad magazine. 

Peter Saul was born in 1934. He has recently returned to the New York area after nearly twenty years of living in Austin, Texas. This is his second show at Nolan/Eckman Gallery. 

Peter Saul, Heads 1986 - 2000

Edited by David Nolan

Interview with Peter Saul by Carroll Dunham

68 pages, softcover, 20 color ill., 8.25 x 9 inches

Published by Nolan/Eckman Gallery, 2000.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

Updated: 15.07.2019

Peter Saul: Paintings and Drawings, 1984-1999, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Paintings and Drawings, 1984-1999
George Adams Gallery, New York
July 9 – August 12, 1999

George Adams Gallery presents paintings and drawings by Peter Saul. The exhibition includes five canvases and three drawings from the period between 1984 and 1999. The Gallery's exhibition coincides with the opening of a retrospective exhibition that will tour four venues in France and Belgium, starting at the Musée de L'abbaye de Sainte Croix, Sables D'Olonne and closing at the Musée Mons, in Belgium. The retrospective exhibition is accompanied by a major monograph comprised of 168 pages with 130 illustrations, an interview with the artist and four essays, including one by Robert Storr.  The text will be published in French and English, and will be available in the U.S. later this summer.

The gallery exhibition includes works dealing with all of Peter Saul's favorite themes. For example, one of the works in the show is from a series of paintings and drawings featuring Ronald Reagan as president. Ronald Reagan in Grenada (1984) depicts a vibrantly colored Reagan single-handedly subduing the Grenada army with fingertip lasers and cans of Coca-Cola. Also included are both the painting and study for Jeffrey Dahmer Won't Eat His Vegetables, 1992, one of many works featuring sexual deviates in electric chairs that have occupied a special place in Peter Saul's work since 1960.

The two most recent works included are Your Brain Says No and The Death of Venus, both from 1999. According to Peter Saul, no one else is doing death, so he thought he would give it a try. ("Someone has to do it," he says). Other works in the show cover such themes as the art world (Art Critics' Suicide, 1996) and women (Woman Artist II, 1984).

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
50 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: Recent Drawing, Nolan Eckman Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Recent Drawing
Nolan/Eckman Gallery, New York
September 17 – October 17, 1998

Peter Saul likens his art to a cold shower or unwelcome interrogation. Clearly, what the artist has in mind is a confrontation. Notwithstanding, the work that he extends to us as provocation is revealing and elemental, highly personal, and fully imbued with humor and charm (a pie in the face, perhaps?).

Peter Saul’s bright colors and lunatic subjects are also litmus tests for the soul; fearlessly visceral, incendiary, and downright disturbing. Define the opposite of political correctness and you will have found Peter Saul. He will accept any reaction but indifference. He speaks in the language of everyday people, uses familiar images and trusts unfailingly in our judgment and humanity.

Over the years, Peter Saul has methodically cut and slashed his way through much of American culture. He has grappled with Vietnam, Angela Davis, the Women’s Movement, racism, Ronald Regan, the male ego, and (recently) Viagra. Through political and topical commentary, Saul partakes of the artistic tradition of social criticism and satire, as embodied by Rabelais, Hogarth, Gross, and Dix.

Peter Saul was born in 1934 in San Francisco. As a young man, he moved between Holland, Paris, and Rome before returning to California in 1964. He resided in Austin, Texas since 1981, and continues to exhibit in this country and internationally. This is his first exhibition at Nolan/Eckman.

NOLAN/ECKMAN GALLERY
560 Broadway, New York, NY 10012
www.nolaneckman.com

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: Early Paintings and Related Drawings, 1960-1964
George Adams Gallery, New York
January 1 – 31, 1998

In 1956, Peter Saul graduated from Washington University in St. Louis and moved with his first wife to Europe. After a brief stay in London, they lived in Amsterdam (1956-1958), near Paris (1958-1962), and finally in Rome (1962 -1964) before returning to the US and settling in Mill Valley, California. It was during this period that Saul defined himself as an artist. At the outset a self-described expressionist painter of landscapes and interiors, Peter Saul soon developed the major themes that remain central to his work even today. The present exhibition consists of paintings and drawings made during his years in Europe which reflect Peter Saul's artistic development as a social critic as well as his involvement with Pop Art, a movement with which he was identified during this time.

Peter Saul was fascinated from an early age by movies and the comics, and even after art school their influence persisted. According to Peter Saul, "The years 1959 - 1961 were pretty much used in reconciling specific drawings from Mad [Magazine] with my need to resemble deKooning." The influence of popular culture - especially the comics - is evident not only in Saul's style and use of cartoon characters - Superman, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck appear as early as 1960  - but also of dialogue balloons, and multi-panel compositions. Along with a cast of characters out of Disney, greed, sex and violence - tabloid subjects that continue to remain central to Peter Saul's work  - make their first appearances during this period.

Peter Saul was not interested in simply making cartoon painting, however: "The problem with cartooniness is that it smooths out too many bumps... To get those 'bumps' back is a lot of work... I summon my memory of drawings on lavatory walls. That usually does it." These early paintings and drawings employ an over-all composition and mark-making typically associated with abstract-expressionism and, at the same time, a visual vocabulary composed entirely of images from popular culture. For all their references to popular culture, Peter Saul was not in fact a "Pop" artist. While he was initially considered a member of the movement and was even included in several Pop surveys (Lucy Lippard's Pop Art of 1966, for example), he was soon dropped and only recently reinstated through his inclusion in the LA County/Whitney Museum's recent "Hand Painted Pop."

The most important distinction between Peter Saul and the artists usually identified with Pop Art is that Peter Saul was interested in the psychological. And, while his early works share similarities with artists such as Lichtenstein, Rivers or Rosenquist, it is artists such as deKooning, Beckmann and Francis Bacon who should be looked to as more important sources. Paintings such as IceBox #3 or Valda Sherman, for example, are rooted less in the Pop Art of Rivers than in social commentary of Bacon and Beckmann. According to Peter Saul, as far as Pop Art was concerned, "my painting had too much emotion." 

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
www.georgeadamsgallery.com

Peter Saul: New Paintings, George Adams Gallery, NYC

Peter Saul: New Paintings
George Adams Gallery, New York
September 20 – October 31, 1996

George Adams Gallery presents an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Saul. 

The paintings in the exhibition, all completed in 1996, cover a wide range of subject matter, including current affairs (OJ Simpson and Newt Gingerich), art history (the Mona Lisa, Dali and Duchamp), and even art criticism (a double portrait of Hilton Kramer and Peter Schjeldahl committing suicide). 

The exhibition also features Peter Saul's first still-life painting, one of his most animated compositions to date.

GEORGE ADAMS GALLERY
50 West 57th Street, New York, NY 10019
www.georgeadamsgallery.com