LOS ANGELES, CA.- Parrasch Heijnen is presenting Peter Alexander, a correlative selection of the artist’s recent sculpture and wall relief work in conversation with his sea and landscape paintings dating from 1990 - 2019. Alexander’s attention to the energies and forces of light and color discerned through observations of atmosphere and water are defining concentrations of this artist’s six-decade practice.
The core of Alexander’s work has consistently remained focused upon a devoted engagement with light in structural space, evoking the emotive sublime in an opulent exploration of color. Whether looking through paint or resin, depth emerges from thin layers and suspended pigments. The artist’s textural play loosely defines focus and horizon lines, often confusing the viewer’s physical orientation. This brilliance permeates through the work’s precise turns bending light by way of tinted gradations. Alexander’s forms transmit luminous energy in relation to their adjacent negative space, with illusionistic light bursting forth from beneath.
Informed by his architectural background (the artist began his career working as an illustrator for architect Richard Neutra), Alexander perceives the atmosphere around him as an allencompassing entity. Encouraging his paint in swift motions to naturally settle, he mirrors the unpredictability of celestial phenomena and seduces the viewer into a hypersensitive state inciting a spectrum of emotive visual perceptions. The artist’s translucent urethane objects envelop the viewer in secluded interiors, consciously engaging with surroundings through various monochromatic hues, echoing a sense of cosmic awareness. Both mediums inform the other, quietly interacting with the senses and capturing the passage of time.
Peter Alexander (b.1939, Los Angeles, CA) has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide since the mid-1960s. Alexander is the recipient of multiple honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980 and the California Art Award in 2014. In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA mounted a retrospective exhibition In this Light inclusive of painting and sculpture. His work resides in the permanent collections of numerous institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; and The Getty Museum, Malibu, CA.
