NYAB Event - Peter Rostovsky "This Distant World"

Peter Rostovsky "This Distant World"

Sara Meltzer Gallery

This event has ended.

For the past few years Rostovsky has been photographing the world around him and collecting images from the Internet as source material for his exactingly rendered, atmospheric paintings. This Distant World continues his fascination with mediation and mediated imagery, presenting a portrait of our time that is both familiar and ordinary, yet charged with allegorical meaning.

The Gymnast Series includes life-size depictions of gymnasts at the moment of dismount from their respective apparatus. Drawing on such diverse influences as Zurbaran, José De Ribera, Robert Longo, and Gerhard Richter, these works are allegories of limbo ; figures suspended in space, neither flying nor falling. Each figure oriented upside down operates as a powerful metaphor for liminality, and depicts a state the artist feels is reflective of our contemporary moment - a condition of either potential triumph or of disastrous freefall.

Rostovsky's paintings of statues continue this dual emphasis on the figure as both classical evocation and victimized body. Here the artist presents the classical form as amputated fragment, by focusing precisely on the absent limbs that characterize most classical statuary. Painted in a hazy, de-saturated palette, these paintings allude to a world of violence and degradation in as much as they channel a fascination with art history and traditional painterly motifs.