Gary Petersen: zip line tow rope
Curated by Alexis Granwell
August 1 - August 31, 2014
Opening Reception: Friday, August 1, 6-10pm

[Images]

PHILADELPHIA, PA-

Tiger Strikes Asteroid is excited to welcome acclaimed New York artist Gary Petersen to the gallery for a solo show organized by Alexis Granwell. Petersen is creating a new site-specific 14’ x 19’ wall painting in addition to several works on paper for our August exhibition, zip line tow rope.  Peterson has installed wall paintings at Ed Winkelman Gallery and Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, but this will be his largest painting to date. Petersen is well-known for animated geometric abstractions that contain complex and puzzling spaces.

As serious and pop-comic as, say, Hilma af Klint plus Nicholas Krushenick, Petersen’s layers of skewed, flexing parallelograms, solid or frame-like, compete yet fail to completely make order and sense. Things come apart or won’t align, like a haywire TV test pattern or exploded diagram. Unjoined framing recalls the mood in de Chirico’s haunting perspectives; vertigo and Hitchcock’s Vertigo come to eye and mind. Order à la Uccello’s series “The Battle of San Romano” under scrutiny collapses into the dissonant space of Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,” or the shifts to the dense, chaotic energy of Ensor’s “Christ’s Entry Into Brussels in 1889.” Teasingly aggressive, initially unsettling but ultimately playful, these constructions don’t conform to nature’s rules; what is solid becomes open, and what is stable turns otherwise.

- From the exhibition essay by Chris Ashley

http://www.somewalls.com.

Gary Petersen was born in Staten Island, New York. He holds a B.S. degree from The Pennsylvania State University and an M.F.A. from The School of Visual Arts. Awards have included The American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Purchase Award 2014, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, Space Program 2010-2011, in Brooklyn, New York, The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, Painting Fellowship Award for 2011, 2002,1993 and the Visual Arts Fellowship Award, Edward F. Albee Foundation, 1988. His work has been exhibited widely in New York City and throughout the United States. He has had solo exhibitions at Winkleman Gallery CRL (2013), Michael Steinberg (New York), 2005; Fusebox (D.C.), 2004; Genovese/Sullivan Gallery (Boston), 2002 & 1999; White Columns (New York), 1992. Recent group exhibitions have included The Elizabeth Harris Gallery, The American Academy of Arts and Letters 2014 Invitational Exhibition, Brian Morris Gallery, The United States State Department, Frosch and Portmann Gallery, Edward Thorp Gallery and Mckenzie Fine Art. Past group exhibitions include Janet Kurnatowski, Theodore Art, Geoffrey Young Gallery, Lori Bookstein, Jason McCoy Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Diverse Works (TX), Newark Museum and The American Academy of Arts and Letters Invitational Exhibition in 1993. Upcoming exhibitions include a solo show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Phildadelphia), 2014 and a wall painting project at the Visual Arts Center in Summit (New Jersey), 2014. In 2013 he curated a group exhibition titled “Endless Summer”, at the Brian Morris Gallery, which was reviewed in Art in America. His work has been reviewed in Art in America (2012 and 2005), The Wall Street Journal, The New York Sun, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and The Partisan Review. He currently has a studio at The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts in New York City and resides in Hoboken, New Jersey.


Alexis Granwell has exhibited internationally including a 2005 solo exhibition at the Europos Parkas Museum, Vilinius, Lithuania. Other venues include exhibitions at IPCNY, New York, NY, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE, University of Richmond Art Museum, Richmond, VA, The Print Center, Ontario, CA, Arlington Center for the Arts, Arlington, VA, Pentimenti Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, Hemphill Gallery, Washington DC and Bryan Miller Gallery, Houston, TX. This past year, she had solo shows at Towson University, Towson, MD and Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT.  Her work has been reviewed in The Globe and Mail, The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Washington Post. Granwell received her MFA (2007) at the University of Pennsylvania. She teaches foundation drawing at Tyler School of Art and printmaking at Moore College of Art and Design. She is one of the founding members of Tiger Strikes Asteroid.