Summary
- American artist Peter Saul has opened an exhibition of new and historic works at New York’s Gladstone Gallery
- The show features 20 works inspired by 20th century icons, including Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso
Peter Saul has carved out his own place among the greats with bold, cartoonish paintings that chew on absurdity of American life and politics. Now, in an art-history themed show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the veteran artist turns his gaze toward the modern masters.
The show, titled Peter Saul’s Art History marks his first solo outing since since joining the gallery last year. With 20 new and historic works on deck, the exhibition spotlights Saul’s irreverent style — somewhere between Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism — as it becomes one with the legacies of Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso.
Anchoring the exhibition is “Little Guernica ‘Liddul Guernica’” (1973), a bold, swollen reimagining of Picasso’s 1937 anti-war masterpiece. On view for the first time in 40 years, the painting channels the Spanish painter’s anti-fascist symbolism with Saul’s own anarchic panache. Shaken by the political climate in which the original “Guernica” emerged, the piece reflects Saul’s own unease, leading him to revisit the historical gravity in a second Picasso-inspired painting in 1977.
Elsewhere around the gallery, Sal riffs on canonical works like Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2” (1912), de Kooning’s “Woman I” (1950) and “The Persistence of Memory” (1931) by Dalí, each as acidic as the next. “While Saul’s homages to Western art history may seem like simple flexes in technical proficiency, they each reflect a deeply nuanced understanding and criticism of 20th century history and its heroes,” the gallery wrote in a recent press statement.
The exhibition is now on view in New York through April 18.
Gladstone Gallery New York
515 West 24th Street,
New York, NY 10011
