Peter Saul
30 Sep 2017 - 28 Jun 2018
PETER SAUL
30 September 2017 − 28 January 2018
From September 30, 2017 to January 28, 2018 the Deichtorhallen Hamburg is presenting an extensive survey exhibition of the work of the American painter PETER SAUL (*1934 in San Francisco, California) at the Falckenberg Collection. The exhibition will show about sixty works by this hitherto little noticed »artists’ artist,« among them groundbreaking groups of works like his Ice Box Paintings, his comics narrations and Vietnam paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as never exhibited drawings and selected late works from the 1980s to the 2000s. The exhibition by Peter Saul will also be complemented by selected works from the Falckenberg Collection.
Long before »Bad Painting« became a central concern in contemporary art, Peter Saul deliberately offended good taste. Beginning in the late 1950s he developed his highly individual idiom blending Pop Art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Chicago Imagism, San Francisco Funk, and cartoon culture, one in which he managed to address complex political and social issues.
Saul shares with Pop Art an interest in the commonplace, in consumer society, and the cheerful pictorial worlds of the comics in glowing, appealing colors. Yet his work is also associated with the aesthetic strategies of the California counterculture. He produces an almost irate kind of painting when depicting the darker sides of the American Dream. In it he combines exuberant humor and playful but harsh criticism of the system. He makes use of jokes, slapstick, puns, comedy, and persiflage, and often crude humor in his caricature-like attacks on American high culture.
Apart from the major artistic schools, Saul developed an extremely idiosyncratic oeuvre. Never really associated with any group or movement, he has been painting in his own way despite changing artistic fashions for more than fifty years. Saul’s paintings tell stories, tend toward exaggeration, and resist unambiguous interpretation.
An exhibition by SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT in cooperation with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg
30 September 2017 − 28 January 2018
From September 30, 2017 to January 28, 2018 the Deichtorhallen Hamburg is presenting an extensive survey exhibition of the work of the American painter PETER SAUL (*1934 in San Francisco, California) at the Falckenberg Collection. The exhibition will show about sixty works by this hitherto little noticed »artists’ artist,« among them groundbreaking groups of works like his Ice Box Paintings, his comics narrations and Vietnam paintings from the 1950s and 1960s, as well as never exhibited drawings and selected late works from the 1980s to the 2000s. The exhibition by Peter Saul will also be complemented by selected works from the Falckenberg Collection.
Long before »Bad Painting« became a central concern in contemporary art, Peter Saul deliberately offended good taste. Beginning in the late 1950s he developed his highly individual idiom blending Pop Art, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Chicago Imagism, San Francisco Funk, and cartoon culture, one in which he managed to address complex political and social issues.
Saul shares with Pop Art an interest in the commonplace, in consumer society, and the cheerful pictorial worlds of the comics in glowing, appealing colors. Yet his work is also associated with the aesthetic strategies of the California counterculture. He produces an almost irate kind of painting when depicting the darker sides of the American Dream. In it he combines exuberant humor and playful but harsh criticism of the system. He makes use of jokes, slapstick, puns, comedy, and persiflage, and often crude humor in his caricature-like attacks on American high culture.
Apart from the major artistic schools, Saul developed an extremely idiosyncratic oeuvre. Never really associated with any group or movement, he has been painting in his own way despite changing artistic fashions for more than fifty years. Saul’s paintings tell stories, tend toward exaggeration, and resist unambiguous interpretation.
An exhibition by SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT in cooperation with the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg