Peter Saul “Fake News”

Mary Boone Gallery (Chelsea)

This event has ended.

Mary Boone Gallery presents at its Chelsea location Fake News, an exhibition of new paintings by Peter Saul.

Peter Saul has maintained his over sixty-year career as an affront to good taste, political correctness, and Academic standards. His unmistakable paintings mash elements of Pop, Surrealism, comics, editorial cartoons, and adolescent doodles - they break down preconceptions of serious art and are impossible to forget. Saul’s high esteem among both his peers and much younger artists comes from this enduring conviction to define on his own terms what constitutes the appropriate subject matter and style for painting.

In the current exhibition, Saul tackles art history and its celebrities, as well as a present-day aspirant and his conundrums. Rembrandt’s 1642 masterpiece is re-imagined as an unthreatening militia of costumed ducks in Nightwatch II, Gainsborough’s beloved portrait subject cools off in Blue Boy with Ice Cream Cone, and the Texas Revolution takes a gruesome turn in Return to the Alamo. Donald Trump in Florida and Quack-Quack, Trump depict our presiding President in a variety of ignoble situations, oblivious to the imminent catastrophe presented in Global Warming, the Last Beer.

Saul’s send-up of politics and former United States presidents is a highlight of the first comprehensive survey exhibition in Europe of his work that is being held at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany, from 2 June through 3 September 2017.