Gary Petersen “Back There Behind the Sun”

McKenzie Fine Art

[Image: Gary Petersen "Slip/Spill" (2016) acrylic on canvas, 84 x 63 in.]

This event has ended.

McKenzie Fine Art commences the fall season with an exhibition of new abstract paintings by Gary Petersen. Petersen’s work has been shown in several group shows at the gallery since 2009; this exhibition marks his first solo outing.

In this exhibition Petersen continues his exploration of colorful, hard-edged geometric and linear forms engaged in layered, dynamic spatial play. The artist’s bright and exuberant color sense belies the sophistication of his compositional arrangements: irregular geometric forms overlap one another with rhythmic energy, punctuated by linear elements which zip across the surface, articulating larger masses of color while providing movement and direction.

Petersen starts his work with an underlying painting of irregular lines, grids, rectilinear forms and attenuated geometries arranged in nesting patterns and diagonals. He then uses a thin wash of white to partially obscure the underpainting.

The veiled substructure becomes the architecture onto which he builds up his third layer of forms, which dance across the surface and engage with the elements underneath in a complex and dynamic dialogue of color and form. Petersen’s process throughout is an intuitive one as he creates multiple spatial layers in his paintings while disrupting a sense of overall coherence, as puzzle-like and moveable lines and forms appear, recede or disappear.

The title of the exhibition, Back There Behind the Sun, references a recurring fictional theme regarding a hypothetical planet on the other side of the sun from earth, which can’t be seen since it orbits exactly opposite from our own planet. Petersen’s paintings hint at another world, glimpsed between his colorful forms moving through space, coupled with an optimistic sense of the endless possibilities of new configurations.

Gary Petersen hails from Staten Island and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally for the last 25 years, and has been reviewed in numerous publications, including Art in America, Artnews, The New Criterion, The Wall Street Journal, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among many others. His work is found in several public collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art in Texas and the Jersey City Museum. He currently maintains a studio in Bushwick and resides in Hoboken, NJ.