Peter Sacks. New Works

About

The exhibition will include over 14 recent paintings as well as collage works on paper. The artist’s approach to painting includes utilizing the most intimate material residues of life —textiles, texts, and traces of objects—all transformed into active fields of energy, empathy and history.

Each work by Sacks is a striking accretion of material, meaning, and emotion. In addition to wood, metal, cardboard, batting and quilting, the rhythmic surfaces are made up of pieces of fabric from Africa, India, Europe, embroidery, fishing nets, buttons and burlap. Garments and fragments such as shrouds, nightshirts and denim work clothes feature prominently in several works and evince the human situation in universal yet intimate ways. By incorporating these artifacts, the artist’s paintings become textured, shapeshifting worlds which register everything from ritual belief to delight or danger, loss or retrieval. Sacks has referred to his intensive process of discovery and layering as “excavating in reverse.”