Peter Wegner Art

Peter Wegner works in multiple media, ranging from paintings and photography to large-scale installations and wall works. His pieces are included in major public and private collecti...

Peter Wegner works in multiple media, ranging from paintings and photography to large-scale installations and wall works. His pieces are included in major public and private collecti...

Oil-based alkyd enamel on plywood panel with cuts. this is a cut plywood wall relief sculpture with paint on it. This has an architectural quality to it. Peter Wegner (born 1963) is an American artist whose works consist of painting, photograph, collage, prints, artist's books, and large-scale installations Born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, Peter Wegner earned his BA at Yale University. He works in multiple media, ranging from paintings and photography to large-scale installations and wall works. His pieces are included in major public and private collections worldwide. He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California. A core theme in Wegner's work is color. Professor, author, and critic Eve Meltzer noted in a 2002 review that “color may be the… center” of his entire practice. The artist first began deconstructing the subject in the late 1990s with his "Remarks on Color" series, which used commercial paint chip samples as their starting point. Another theme identified by experts is Wegner's engagement with architecture. For example, in his photography series "Buildings Made of Sky," Wegner reverses urban streetscapes to reveal how skyscrapers shape the open-air spaces between one another into skyscraper-like forms of their own. Wegner has also often pushed the construction of his works in an architectural direction, presenting paintings in the form of leaning columns, complex lattices, and multi-layered scrims. Huldisch noted that “[h]is stacks, grids, and lattice structures reveal both an interest in the forms of Minimalism and a rejection of the stringent doctrine that predicated them." Wegner's early work focuses on everyday artifacts embedded in popular culture, including typography specimens (the basis for the "American Types" series), commercial paint chips (in the "Remarks on Color" series), and security envelopes (in the "Security" series). Wegner produced in 2005 the "Lever Labyrinth," a human-scale maze composed of 2.2 million sheets of stacked paper––all in various shades of green, creating columns of subtly gradating color––constructed inside the Lever House building. In 2008, Wegner executed the major paper installation "GUILLOTINE OF SUNLIGHT, GUILLOTINE OF SHADE" at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The piece consisted of 1.4 millions sheets of die-cut paper in 40 hues, arranged to create two 12’ x 26.5’ x 7" color gradations inside the museum: a wall progressing from blue to yellow in one gallery, and a wall progressing from yellow to red in another. Around this same time, Wegner introduced two new elements into his work: time and neon. He combined both in 2007 to create “THE UNITED STATES OF NOTHING,” which included time-controlled neon signage showing the name, latitude, and longitude of every U.S. city that invokes the concept of nothingness. He has showed at William Griffin Gallery. The gallery has featured solo exhibitions by James Turrell, Richard Long, Robert Rauschenberg, David Lynch, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra, Tony Smith, Peter Wegner, Greg Colson, Liza Ryan and others. It has presented group exhibitions such as Early California Minimalism, a survey of significant early works by Robert Irwin, John McCracken, and Craig Kauffman; and Wall Installations, with works by Maya Lin, James Turrell, Richard Long, Robert Therrien, Teresita Fernández, Karin Sander, Peter Wegner, and Kira Lynn Harris. It has also presented projects of work by Richard Tuttle, Ana Mendieta...