Exhibition

Nathan Peter: Garden

17 Mar 2020 – 18 Apr 2020

Regular hours

Tuesday
12:00 – 18:00
Wednesday
12:00 – 18:00
Thursday
12:00 – 18:00
Friday
12:00 – 18:00
Saturday
12:00 – 18:00

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PSM

Berlin
Berlin, Germany

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  • U2 Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz
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On the occasion of his third solo exhibition with PSM, Nathan Peter is presenting a new body of works along with his first monograph, published by Hatje Cantz.

About

With the exhibition Garden, Peter
continues his characteristic examination of the painting material and classical motifs, while also navigating toward new appropriations and expansion of both content and imagery.

During the process of developing new techniques and works, the association with a garden in which
the cycle of growth and decay can be observed every year occurred to Peter. The garden can be a place of exquisite refinement or left to run wild, but most importantly it is a space of perpetual transformation. This was a natural extension of Peter's parallel figurative and abstract bodies of work and a way to combine them freely. The gardener digs physically with bare hands into the earth in
order to plant new growth while nurturing pre-existing vegetation and to the best of his ability control or not his understanding of nature. So too does Peter's work grow in proportion to his understanding of the material.

Studies about light and the fall of folds both pictorially and tactilely take a central role in Peter’s oeuvre. He translates these themes of ephemerality through a reductive way of painting by erasing instead of adding, dissecting—cutting up, unravelling, or grinding away—in order to create something new. The elements of gesture, abstraction, the grid and the figurative all fall under this treatment. The cutting of the canvas is a dissection of those parallel subjects to come to a clearer understanding. Breaking things down to their individual components so that sewing them back together becomes a structural method of integrating these manifold ideas and bodies. This is reminiscent of grafting, the horticultural technique whereby tissues of different plants are joined so as to continue their growth together.

In Garden, Peter presents both new visual inspiration and methods of connection. In the series of works cosmic garden he uses the sewing machine and the sewn thread as a structural order to assemble divided picture elements into new arrangements. Large droplets dripped with turpentine expose the ground of the painting and unify the surface like fresh raindrops on the fallen leaves and petals of

the illustrated motifs, while also acting as a visual irritant, like splatters of bleach. Inversely from the painted flora in the sewn painting, the exposed canvas becomes the fallen leaves and undergrowth of a wild garden. The blocks of color protrude like pavement stones pushed up by a tangle of roots. In
the work maille, this unfolding and pixilation translates into single pieces of painted canvas. The single squares have been reconnected to a unified surface by delicate metal rings, which physically connect

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Exhibiting artistsToggle

Nathan Peter

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