NYAB Event - Peter Campus “Dredgers”

Peter Campus “Dredgers”

Cristin Tierney Gallery

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Campus’ newest video works are increasingly abstract and gloriously hued. Pieces such as providence combine the riotous colors and loosely structured forms of early fauvism with a brilliant saturation and pixelation that could only be achieved in the digital era. Other works, such as offshore, break down the observed landscape, transforming it into a rumination on the effects of light and movement across various surfaces. Continually interested in cognitive psychology and perception, Campus explores the gap between what we see, what the camera records, and what we imagine a landscape to be.

This group of videos is part of a continuing series that Campus began in 2008, overtly referencing the history of painting. An unrepentant formalist, Campus’ pieces have a sophisticated sensibility and compositional clarity derived from great masters such as Cezanne, Corot and Rothko. Since his emergence in the seventies with the creation of classic video works and installations such as Kiva, Anamnesis, and Three Transitions, Campus has repeatedly investigated the nature of subjectivity. Early works were more narcissistic and Freudian in nature, focusing on individual identity and the shaping of the self. These new videos instead explore communal experience and cognition, and how and when we arrive at a shared understanding of the surrounding world.

Tierney Gardarin is thrilled to announce several recent major acquisitions of Campus’ work, most notably the accession of Kiva and five single channel videos into the collection of the Whitney Museum. Kiva was first shown at the Whitney Annual in 1973, and thus it is particularly fitting that this acquisition would occur on the eve of the upcoming Whitney Biennial. Other museums who have recently acquired Campus’ work include the Tate Modern, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the University of Michigan Art Museum and the Parrish Art Museum. A selection of new work can also be seen at the Cartagena Biennial, which opened on February 7th.

Peter Campus is widely considered a seminal figure in the history of video and new media art. One of the very first to pick up a video camera and create art, Campus’ works are part of numerous collections including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Reina Sofia, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City; San Francisco Museum of American Art, San Francisco; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen; Fondation Cartier; Fondation Berne; and the Kramlich Collection.