Gary Peterson: Tilting Points

GARY PETERSEN

Gary Petersen was born in Staten Island, New York. He holds a B.S. degree from The Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts. Awards have included The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Space Program, 2010-2011, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Painting Fellowship Award, 1993, 2002, and 2011, and the Visual Arts Fellowship Award, Edward F. Albee Foundation, 1988. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States including solo exhibitions at Michael Steinberg, New York, Fusebox, Washington, D.C., Genovese/Sullivan Gallery, Boston, and White Columns, New York. Recent group exhibitions have included Jason McCoy Gallery, Theodore Art, Storefront Bushwick Gallery, Edward Thorp Gallery, McKenzie Fine Art, Lori Bookstein Gallery, Allegra La Viola Gallery, The Painting Center, Sue Scott Gallery, and The Bronx River Art Center. Past group exhibitions include Janet Kurnatowski, Lohin-Geduld, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Triple Candie, Plus/Ultra (Winkleman) Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Diverse Works (TX), the Newark Museum and The American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been reviewed and covered by Art in America, The Wall Street Journal, NY Arts Magazine, Whitehot Magazine, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Boston Globe and The Partisan Review. He currently maintains a studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn and resides in Hoboken, New Jersey.

All images are installation details from Tilting Points, 2014, acrylic on wall

68 Elm Street, Summit, NJ 07901

www.artcenternj.org

Major support for the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey is provided in part by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Wilf Family Foundations, the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, The Horizon Foundation of New Jersey, the WJS Foundation, and Art Center members and donors. Additional support is also provided by the Art Center’s Exhibition Support Team: Helaine & John Winer and Elisa & Louis Zachary.

TILTING POINTS

and teal; peach, tangerine and orange; pink, magenta and violet; and shades ranging from grey and ochre to tan, brown, maroon, and aubergine.

With extended looking, some color juxtapositions may prompt optical effects, as the assertive yellow background pushes forward and then recedes.

GARY PETERSEN

TILTING POINTS SEPTEMBER 28, 2014 – JANUARY 18, 2015 Gary Petersen is a New York-based painter known for his dynamic and colorful geometric abstractions. During the past several years he has extended his studio practice and experimented with large-scale paintings directly on the wall. For this site-specific project in Studio X, Petersen has created a painting that encompasses all five of the gallery walls. The viewer entering the space is immediately surrounded by and immersed in the work. Tilting Points is effectively a “walk-in” painting that transforms two-dimensional imagery into a threedimensional environment.

Responding to the architecture of Studio X, Petersen takes full advantage of its somewhat quirky features. The low ceiling, off-center glass door, angled fifth wall and oblique corners make the room an ideal space for Petersen’s work, which presents fresh perspectives on geometric structure. The artist works intuitively and looks to his own previous work for inspiration. The tilted forms resembling empty frames derive from his vertically oriented paintings on wood and canvas; here he stretches and distorts their shapes to fit the horizontal format of the wall. There is perhaps some irony in Petersen’s use of this imagery, as the gallery wall—normally a site for framed paintings—literally becomes a painting of empty frames.

A skilled colorist, Petersen chose a sunny yellow hue as the perfect backdrop for angled lines of varying widths, lengths and colors. These lines zip across the gallery walls, sometimes climbing sharply or making sudden drops. Lines often balance tautly on their points of origin; at other times they ricochet around the room, bouncing from point to point.

Petersen employs a rich and nuanced palette to disperse and balance colors throughout the gallery, building subtle relationships through repetition and variation. The viewer’s eye wanders from color to color: aqua, green, turquoise

Stacks of off-kilter polygons suggest mazes or telescoping tunnels and this layering of angled lines and shapes has a mesmerizing effect. Forms appear to tip and spill into the gallery, while simultaneously receding. This conveys the illusion of deeper space behind the gallery walls, and even more dramatically, makes some of the walls look like they are tilting. The compression and expansion of space is in constant dialogue with Peterson’s intricate linear network, building a tension that activates the work. Some taut lines appear as if stretched like elastic bands, ready to spring back at any moment.

Petersen’s interest in how things simultaneously come together and pull apart is evident in the way Tilting Points negotiates the five corners of Studio X. Lines continue their expansive trajectories over the oblique corners, causing straight lines to appear bent on the angled wall. As lines approach and intersect the right-angled corners, they often rebound and change direction like a speeding pinball. Far from painting himself into a corner, Petersen has liberated the corner from a terminal point to a point of departure.

The artist considers the idea of contradiction to be central to his work. Seeking a balance between chaos and control, he plays with opposing ideas such as horizontal and vertical formats, warm and cool colors, real and illusionistic space, compression and expansion, geometry and pop culture. Equally at ease with the realm of the math book and the comic book, Tilting Points piques the intellect as well as the emotions, and satisfies both.

Mary Birmingham Curator