AUGUST 05 - SEPTEMBER 30, 2004
Works from the 1950s and 1960s
Summer Picnic
PET-043-OC
Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a rare selection of brilliant early paintings by San Francisco artist Roland Petersen, August 5th - October 2nd. The exhibition is accompanied by a full-color catalogue with essay by Bruce Guenther, Chief Curator, Portland Art Museum.
The show highlights oils executed during the late 1950s and 1960s, before Petersen’s health dictated he change to a water-based medium. These scarce early works are considered high points from Petersen’s most dynamic and collectible period and form the foundation for his lifelong explorations into light, color, form, and geometry.
The show includes several works from Petersen’s highly acclaimed 1960’s Picnic series, as well as a powerful group of paintings executed in a single year, 1960, that showcase the artist’s imaginative range at that time.
“We have assembled several key works from Roland Petersen’s greatest period,” says Gallery director Michael Hackett, “in order to show his unique sensibility and synthesis of European and west coast influences.”
Petersen’s emphasis on formal structure and the push-pull of the picture plane shows the tutelage of Hans Hofmann, a seminal influence. Yet, with their saturated colors and geometry, Petersen’s works bring to mind the gestural brushwork of bay area artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn, who radically revitalized figurative painting here after World War II.
Like these artists, Petersen was steeped in art history, and his architectonic compositions call to mind Paul Cézanne’s fractured geometries and Picasso’s Cubist disintegration of the picture plane. “Petersen’s connections to Bay Area figuration are strong,” says Hackett, “but his early work is utterly innovative and fresh in its own right.”
A series from 1960 shows Petersen at his most inventive. Lone Figure with Palm Tree and Nude Bather Near Red Water feature thin, translucent washes of unusually keyed color and scumbling brushstrokes; from this tumult of expression, Petersen’s figures emerge into the picture plane.
These works are more overtly emotive and moody than classic later paintings, such as June Luncheon (1961) and Picnic with Single Bather (1969). The latter are composed of tightly structured geometric forms in jewel-tone colors, often thickly painted; in these outstanding works, emotion is masterfully channeled, contained by color and form.
Born in Denmark in 1926, Petersen studied with painter Chiura Obata at UC Berkeley in the late 1940s, and later with Hans Hofmann, W.S. Hayter, and others. In 1956 Petersen became an influential founding member of the art department at the University of California, Davis, a post he held for 37 years. Petersen continues to live in the Bay Area and paints actively.
Roland Petersen’s work is represented in more than thirty museum collections in the U.S. and Europe, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; The Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.