Peters Sacks: New Paintings
Oct 4, 2012 - Feb 9, 2013
Press Release
Reviews
Bloch, Talia. Peter Sacks New Paintings
The Brooklyn Rail, 6 Nov. 2012
Shuster, Robert. Peter Sacks: New Paintings
The Village Voice, 24 Oct. 2012
Merkin, Daphne. Where a Thousand Words Paint a Picture
The New York Times, 22 Dec. 2012
Press Release
Paul Rodgers/9W is pleased to present its second exhibition of new paintings by the South African-American artist Peter Sacks. This exhibition comes three years after the gallery’s highly successful and acclaimed introduction of the artist to the New York art world, which awakened strong museum and private collector interest in his work. In addition to new examples of the large triptychs, with their rich compositions, combining painterly technique with collaged textile, including the artist’s signature hand-typed text on linen, which made such an impression in the first exhibition, Sacks here presents a new series of striking six foot square paintings.
It was widely remarked that the paintings in Peter Sacks’s first exhibition made a strongly independent statement against the background of much contemporary art. While they were clearly charged with conceptual content and reached convincingly across from art into life, they rejected the prevalent tendency towards industrial finish and reductive simplicity of image. The paintings in this new exhibition continue to pursue this renewal of complexity and almost archaeological depth, with emphasis on invested time, both in the making and viewing of the art.
However, the new series strikes a different chord from the previous work and marks a significant shift in the artist’s formal language. If Peter Sacks, to date, has signaled a desire to expand the experience of art with an ability to inject a wide range of allusive content, summoning up the narrative of lived experience, here, with these new square-formatted paintings (the Six by Six series) he shows his awareness of how contemporary art has developed a new visual language based in the formal exploration of material and materiality itself. The extraordinary new paintings emphasize tactility and structure, confronting time with architecture, all the while compressing and reimagining the organic and the fabricated, in the man-made space of the square.
Peter Sacks’s first exhibition at the gallery prompted strong critical endorsement with a substantial review in Artforum by Rosalind Krauss. There was also a strong response from leading museums with paintings being acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Boston Museum of Fine Art and the Houston Museum of Fine Art, as well as by many distinguished private collections.
“New Paintings,” by Peter Sacks runs October 4, 2012 through February 9, 2013, at Paul Rodgers 9W Gallery.
The opening reception will be held on Thursday October 4, from 6 to 8 pm.
Exhibited Works
