Lamar Peterson
Fredericks & Freiser is proud to announce an exhibition of new work by Lamar Peterson. The exhibition will include paintings on canvas and paper as well as mixed-media collage. This will be Peterson°s first solo show at Fredericks & Freiser. A full color catalogue with an essay by Martha Schwendener will accompany the exhibition.
Lamar Peterson°s paintings tend to depict the suburban everyman (specifically the black suburban everyman and his nuclear family) in tableaux of pastoral leisure. His characters sport enormous smiles that beam out from their utopian settings, conveying at once a sense of child-like wonder and vacant plasticity. Yet this is a dream world, casual horror abounds¬faces melt, water rises up, unearthly creatures play with the children.
“Peterson has described this body of work as ‘a diary,’ a catalog of recent events, from the media-frenzied Michael Jackson trial to Basquiat's recent retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum, to revelations about Kate Moss using cocaine. All of this–the circus
of pop culture, entertainment, and art–is background noise, of course, for the greater historical moment: post-9/11, war, global terrorism. Like the Surrealists, whose images reflected the complicated era in which they lived, the dream space of Peterson°s painting has been invaded, however subtly, by the Daliesque ‘premonitions of war.’ In this context, the ever-present smile of his early paintings has become frighteningly ambiguous. Before, we could believe in a bit of its manic, magic cheerfulness. Now it’s downright suspect, a mask that begins to look insidious even to its wearers.” ~Martha Schwendener
About the Artist
Peterson was born 1974 in St. Petersburg, Florida. He lives and works in New York. Lamar Peterson has had solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum of Harlem, NY; Richard Heller Gallery, CA; Deitch Projects, NY. He has exhibited in numerous group shows including the Fifth International SITE Santa Fe Biennial 2004, NM; The Drawing Center, NY; Boston Center for the Arts, MA; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina.