PETER SAUL

Peter Saul has been deemed the father of Pop Art and a successor to Surrealism. One of the most important artists of our time, Saul is a consistent “violator of good taste” in art and the founder of Bad Painting style. This trend in American figurative painting created in 1970-s as a focused or deliberate disrespect for recent styles of painting, is characterized by a bright palette of colors and intentionally exaggerated distortion of images.

Along with artists such as Sue Williams, Kara Walker, Robert Melee and Carroll Dunham, Saul’s sarcastic paintings embodied an art movement that protested social injustice and political incorrectness that flourished in USA, reflecting subjects drawn from mass media and art history.

In the 1950s, Saul introduced the iconic cartoon characters, Superman and Donald Duck, to his expressionist paintings; in the mid-1960s, he devoted a series of anti-military works to the Vietnam War; and, in the 1970s, he created his own variations of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” and Picasso’s “Guernica”.

Saul’s use of childlike marks and clashing colors are meant to both disturb and engage the viewer. And yet, despite the display of pictorial irreverence, the paintings are grounded in working knowledge of art history, laying the foundation for sophisticated and powerful dialogues between stylistic formal considerations, political ideas, and autobiographical detail.

In 2020, the largest retrospective of works by Peter Saul was opened in the New Museum in New York. He has been the subject of retrospective exhibitions at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2019); Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2017); Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2017); Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, CA (2008); Pennsylvania Academy of Arts, Philadelphia (2008); Musée de l’Abbaye Sainte-Croix, Les Sables d’Olonne, France (1999); Musée de l’Hôtel Bertrand, Châteauroux, France (1999); Aspen Art Museum (1989); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1989); Contemporary Austin – Laguna Gloria, Austin (1989); Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (1989); Swen Parson Gallery, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb (1980); and Madison Art Center, Madison, WI (1980).

Courtesy Gary Tatintsian Gallery