Peter Opheim

#195

2013

Peter Opheim was born in Landstuhl, Germany in 1961 and raised in Minnesota, where he earned his B.A. from St. Olaf College in 1983. He went on to build a career in New York, where he continues to live and work today. Opheim began as an abstract painter, and his early work drew serious institutional attention — in 1995 he received the prestigious Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, one of the most respected awards in contemporary art. That same decade he was also recognized with the Artist's Award from the Friends of Contemporary Art at the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe. Over time, his practice evolved into the figurative, Neo-Pop work he is best known for today — large-scale oil paintings of biomorphic characters rooted in the fears and fantasies of childhood. He typically sculpts his subjects in clay first, then translates them into paint, often exhibiting both the maquettes and finished canvases together. His work has appeared in over 50 solo and group exhibitions across galleries and art fairs in North America, Europe, and Asia, and is held in numerous public and private collections. In 2017 he received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for sculpture, further cementing his standing as one of New York's more distinctive voices in contemporary painting.