Press Release

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present a selection of paintings by Peter Joseph, the artist to have held the longest continuous association with Lisson Gallery, since its inaugural year in 1967. Over the course of his fifty-year career, Joseph was recognised for his early paintings of simple, formally symmetrical shapes in a carefully considered colour palette. Joseph’s late-career paintings in this presentation, 2013–2014, highlight the artist’s experimentation with a looser structure and extend a departure from the closed boundaries of his early work.

Often inspired by nature and classical architecture, Peter Joseph approached his paintings with a consistent conceptual practice similar to that of an architect’s abstract. Joseph would start by collaging together small swatches of painted canvas before transferring the small compositions onto restaged, large-scale paintings. The works in the presentation feature angular and biomorphic shapes floating over a neutral ground, which occasionally disintegrate or collapse into semi-translucent ethereal washes.

Lisson Gallery’s East Hampton space continues its focused format featuring both influential, historical artworks and debuting new bodies of work in an experimental, intimate setting. The Peter Joseph exhibition follows solo presentations at the gallery by Lawrence Weiner, Cory Arcangel, Sean Scully, Joanna Pousette-Dart, Pedro Reyes and Shirazeh Houshiary. The gallery is open to the public each Thursday through Saturday, from 11am to 4pm, Sundays from 11 – 4pm and Wednesdays by appointment. Lisson Gallery’s East Hampton space will close for the season beginning September 19, and re-open in Spring 2023.

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About the Artist

Peter Joseph has, over the course of decades, dedicated his practice to seeking the potential in constraint. He rose to critical acclaim in the 1970s for his meditative, two-colour paintings, which set one rectangle within a frame of a darker shade. These early works are characterized by perfect symmetry, where every decision about colour and proportion can be seen to be redolent of time, mood or place. While comparable to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman, Joseph’s is an anomalous strain of Minimalism: his allegiance lies as much with Renaissance masters as with his contemporaries, he says. More recently his format has departed from his established ‘architecture’ to divide the canvas into two planes, horizontally or vertically, wherein loose brushwork, natural tones and patches of exposed canvas tap into new feeling. As Joseph says: ‘A painting must generate feeling otherwise it is dead’.

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Also Exhibiting at Lisson Gallery

Address
55 Main Street
East Hampton
United States
Opening Hours
Temporarily closed
Thurs - Sat, 11am - 5pm
Sun, 11am - 4pm
Wed, by appointment
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East Hampton 55 Main Street
Lisson Gallery
55 Main Street, East Hampton, United States

Opening hours
Temporarily closed
Thurs - Sat, 11am - 5pm
Sun, 11am - 4pm
Wed, by appointment
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