Peter Wegner (American artist)

Last updated

Peter Wegner
Born1963 (age 59–60)
Sioux Falls, South Dakota, US
NationalityAmerican
Education Yale
Known forPaintings, photographs, collages, prints, artist's books, and large-scale installations

Peter Wegner (born 1963) is an American artist whose works consist of paintings, photographs, collages, prints, artist's books, and large-scale installations. His pieces are included in major public and private collections worldwide.

Contents

Early life and education

Wegner was born in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He earned his BA at Yale University. He works in multiple media, ranging from paintings and photography to large-scale installations and wall works.

Themes

Critics and scholars have identified at least four major themes in Wegner's work.

Systems

The first theme is the idea of systems and their hidden inadequacies. As architectural scholar Noah Chasin wrote in a 2007 essay,

"Systems often make appearances in Wegner's work to suggest the potential for order, yet the artist continually exposes them as means of introducing disorder… [H]e systematically questions their foundations from within so that the very integrity of each system's signifying capacity is compromised…." [1]

Wagner'ss official bio states that "[h]e often works between conventional categories, creating sculpting, paintings, painterly installations, and architectural photographs." [2] However, Chasin advises viewers to see this aspect of the artist's approach as a constructive rather than a destructive one: “We should not conclude that Wegner’s subversion eliminates meaning but instead that it draws our attention to the way that meaning is created and naturalized.” [1]

Color

Professor, author, and critic Eve Meltzer noted in a 2002 review that “color may be the… center” of his entire practice. [3] Poet and essayist John Koethe also described Wegner as "obsessed with color." [1] 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.

Wagner's color-based "D65" series, begun in 2014, takes its title from "the standard scientific shorthand for the color of daylight", about 6500 kelvins and is "inspired by sunlight in California," according to Wegner. [4] More than a decade earlier, Meltzer linked his use of color with market mechanisms. She wrote of the paint chip works that

"...there is always the problem of capital and its ideological effects. After all the paint chip is an advertising tool—a ploy to make a buck on a dream. Wegner's work makes these systems palpable, not through barefaced institutional critique, but by quietly elbowing some room into their rigid structures or—as he says in his book The Other Today Is the One You Want (2002) by opening up the space between the lines’ and pushing back the horizon.’" [3]

Language

A third theme identified in Wegner's work is language. Meltzer writes that Wegner's paint chip pieces beg the question: “How can so many shades of red claim the same name when, clearly, language’s system of difference can’t fracture fast enough or splinter small enough to cover the range?” [3]

In a 2007 essay, Henriette Huldisch observed that Wegner “repeatedly invokes language specifically to create associations, to link his works back to the world of ideas and things from which they originated: systems of classification, names of places, and the incidental items of our daily lives (rulers, billboards, contracts, and so on).” [1] Huldisch goes on to describe how “Wegner also work[s] as a bibliophile collagist, appropriating snippets of marketing jargon, then cutting and pasting the functional epithets into semi-accidental verse he terms ‘poetry written by commerce.’" [1]

Architecture

A fourth 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. Chasin described a 2004 piece from the series in these terms:

“A magical reversal thereby takes place: the physical buildings read visually as a darkened background offset by architectural contours from startling blue-hued visions of skyscrapers carved from atmosphere. Sky becomes building; building, sky—or to invoke K. Michael Hays in a different context, ‘not architecture but evidence that it exists.’” [1]

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." [1] As Wagner states in a 2007 interview,

"I’d like the humor of the work to make itself available to you slowly, so that maybe a couple hours after you’ve been exposed to it, it's still sinking in. You’re not actually laughing until the second or third day, and by that time, you can't quite remember what was funny." [5]

Key works

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). [1] When asked in an interview about his interest in such mundane subjects, he answered, "The world is ravishing. Even when you’re focused on nothing, it's almost too much." [6] From roughly the mid-1990s to early 2000s, he gave used these ideas in paintings, works on paper, and artist's books.

In the mid-2000s, Wegner's practice expanded to include large-scale site-specific art installations. The first of these was "COMPLETE & FINAL COLOR THEORY SUPERSEDING ALL PREVIOUS THEORIES & PRE-EMPTING ALL FUTURE THEORIES WITH ADD’L THOUGHTS ON THE POETRY OF COMMERCE, THE CRUELTY OF SYSTEMS & THE BANALITY OF THE GRID, ACCOMPANIED BY A FOOTNOTE RE: ARCHITECTURE” at New York's Bohen Foundation in 2004. [7] The installation included monumental paint chip-based paintings and sculptures made from colored paper, either stacked vertically or arrayed in horizontal, hedge-like rows.

Wegner followed in 2005 with "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. [8]

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’ [9]

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. [10] Wegner arranged each neon unit according to its relative geography on a midnight blue-painted wall meant to stand in for the continental U.S.

Stanford University commission

Stanford University commissioned Wegner to create four permanent installations on the campus of its Graduate School of Business. In a Los Angeles Times feature on the works, arts writer Jori Finkel noted, that it was

"...an unusual project in many ways. Most public art is inserted into a landscape after the fact, but Wegner's artworks were integrated into the campus… And though most university art tends to be committee-sanctioned or boring, Wegner's suite of works for Stanford are thought-provoking in ways that his supporters have come to expect." [5]

Kinetic works at Stanford

Completed in 2011, the quartet includes two kinetic works and two static works. The kinetic pieces include "WAYS TO CHANGE" and "MONUMENT TO CHANGE AS IT CHANGES." The former is a wall-sized (171" x 216" x 8") glass, steel, and LED display depicting hundreds of adverbs programmed to illuminate in pre-determined groupings on a continuous 90-minute loop. [5] Finkel mentions that it was "built into the façade of an auditorium that had to be redesigned and re-permitted to accommodate its weight and behind-the-scenes apparatus," and that the work "could be seen to question the business school's—or business world's—emphasis on productivity. ‘It raises the question not of what you are doing, but how you are doing it,’ says the artist." [5]

“MONUMENT TO CHANGE AS IT CHANGES" is an enormous (108" x 384" x 3") array of "flip-digit" modules of the variety used to announce arrivals and departures in European train stations––except instead of digits, each module contains 80 cards individually screen printed a different solid color. Wegner then programmed the entire array to animate through a continuous eight-hour cycle of constantly changing patterns. Wegner tells Finkel in the Times feature,

"The train signage arrives at a particular destination [visually], just as you would in a train, somewhere that's specific and recognizable. The way I've programmed the board there's never a moment of stasis or arrival—it's perpetual arrival." [5]

Static works at Stanford

The two works static works in the commission are both

Later works

Wegner's next permanent installation was "HELL-WHISKEY-GUNS-MUD-MICHIGAN," completed in 2014 for Michigan State University. [11] Similar to "THE UNITED STATES OF NOTHING" and "WAYS TO CHANGE," it uses an LED display to continuously cycle through pre-programmed groupings of text. [11] Their subject matter is the place names and GPS coordinates of various locations in Michigan, which Wegner divides into categories such as verbs, colors, and historical figures; the program lasts two full hours before repeating, and the LEDs are partially covered by glass and wood veneer. [11]

In 2014, Wegner also began concentrating on creating individual paintings again. His "Color Wheel" and "D65" series focus on color relationships played out over ring-shaped, wall mounted MDF in various diameters. [4] [12]

Collections

Permanent installations

Lectures

Artist's books and monographs

Exhibitions and projects

Installation view of Wegner show "Terra Firma Incognita" at William Griffin Gallery. Photographed by William Griffin Gallery Wegner TFI.jpg
Installation view of Wegner show "Terra Firma Incognita" at William Griffin Gallery. Photographed by William Griffin Gallery

Press

Personal life

He currently lives and works in Berkeley, California.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">San Francisco Museum of Modern Art</span> Modern and contemporary art museum in San Francisco, California (SFMOMA)

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum located in San Francisco, California. A nonprofit organization, SFMOMA holds an internationally recognized collection of modern and contemporary art, and was the first museum on the West Coast devoted solely to 20th-century art. The museum's current collection includes over 33,000 works of painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, design, and media arts, and moving into the 21st century. The collection is displayed in 170,000 square feet (16,000 m2) of exhibition space, making the museum one of the largest in the United States overall, and one of the largest in the world for modern and contemporary art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert Irwin (artist)</span> American installation artist (born 1928)

Robert W. Irwin is an American installation artist who has explored perception and the conditional in art, often through site-specific, architectural interventions that alter the physical, sensory and temporal experience of space.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eva Hesse</span> German-born American sculptor and textile artist (1936-1970)

Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.

Damien Smith is a Canadian artist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Candida Höfer</span> German photographer (born 1944)

Candida Höfer is a German photographer. She is a former student of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like other Becher students, Höfer's work is known for technical perfection and a strictly conceptual approach. From 1997 to 2000, she taught as professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe. Höfer is the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography award, as part of the Sony World Photography awards. She is based in Cologne.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">April Greiman</span> American designer

April Greiman is an American designer widely recognized as one of the first designers to embrace computer technology as a design tool. Greiman is also credited, along with early collaborator Jayme Odgers, with helping to import the European New Wave design style to the US during the late 70s and early 80s." According to design historian Steven Heller, “April Greiman was a bridge between the modern and postmodern, the analog and the digital.” “She is a pivotal proponent of the ‘new typography’ and new wave that defined late twentieth-century graphic design.” Her art combines her Swiss design training with West Coast postmodernism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Raymond Saunders (artist)</span> American artist (born 1934)

Raymond Saunders is an American artist known for his multimedia paintings which often have sociopolitical undertones, and which incorporate assemblage, drawing, collage and found text. Saunders is also recognized for his installation, sculpture, and curatorial work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Wessel Jr.</span> American photographer and educator (1942–2018)

Henry Wessel was an American photographer and educator. He made "obdurately spare and often wry black-and-white pictures of vernacular scenes in the American West".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mark Grotjahn</span> American painter (born 1968)

Mark Grotjahn is an American painter best known for abstract work and bold geometric paintings. Grotjahn lives and works in Los Angeles.

Robert Alan Bechtle was an American painter, printmaker, and educator. He lived nearly all his life in the San Francisco Bay Area and whose art was centered on scenes from everyday local life. His paintings are in a Photorealist style and often depict automobiles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Shelton (sculptor)</span> American sculptor

Peter Shelton is a contemporary American sculptor born in 1951 in Troy, Ohio.

Craig Kauffman was an artist who has exhibited since 1951. Kauffman's primarily abstract paintings and wall relief sculptures are included in over 20 museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Tate Modern, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Light and Space</span> Art movement

Light and Space denotes a loosely affiliated art movement related to op art, minimalism and geometric abstraction originating in Southern California in the 1960s and influenced by John McLaughlin. It is characterized by a focus on perceptual phenomena, such as light, volume and scale, and the use of materials such as glass, neon, fluorescent lights, resin and cast acrylic, often forming installations conditioned by the work's surroundings. Whether by directing the flow of natural light, embedding artificial light within objects or architecture, or by playing with light through the use of transparent, translucent or reflective materials, Light and Space artists make the spectator's experience of light and other sensory phenomena under specific conditions the focus of their work. From the movement's inception, artists were incorporating into their work the latest technologies of the Southern California-based engineering and aerospace industries to develop sensuous, light-filled objects. Turrell, who has spread the movement worldwide, summed up its philosophy in saying, "We eat light, drink it in through our skins."

Robert Boardman Howard (1896–1983), was a prominent American artist active in Northern California in the first half of the twentieth century. He is also known as Robert Howard, Robert B. Howard and Bob Howard. Howard was celebrated for his graphic art, watercolors, oils, and murals, as well as his Art Deco bas-reliefs and his Modernist sculptures and mobiles.

Leslie Shows is an American artist, who is recognized for expanding the boundaries of landscape painting.

Barbara "Bobbie" Stauffacher Solomon is an American landscape architect and graphic designer. Barbara Stauffacher Solomon is best known for her large-scale interior ‘supergraphics’ and exterior signage at Sea Ranch, a private estate with a utopian vision in Sonoma County, California.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lauretta Vinciarelli</span> Italian born Architect, artist, educator

Lauretta Vinciarelli was an artist, architect, and professor of architecture at the collegiate level.

Sandra S. "Sandy" Phillips is an American writer, and curator working in the field of photography. She is the Curator Emeritus of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. She joined the museum as curator of photography in 1987 and was promoted to senior curator of photography in 1999 in acknowledgement of her considerable contributions to SFMOMA. A photographic historian and former curator at the Vassar College Art Gallery in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Phillips succeeded Van Deren Coke as head of one of the country’s most active departments of photography. Phillips stepped down from her full time position in 2016.

Marlon Mullen is a painter who lives and works in Contra Costa County, California, maintaining a studio practice at NIAD Art Center.

Nancy Genn is an American artist living and working in Berkeley, California known for works in a variety of media, including paintings, bronze sculpture, printmaking, and handmade paper rooted in the Japanese washi paper making tradition. Her work explores geometric abstraction, non-objective form, and calligraphic mark making, and features light, landscape, water, and architecture motifs. She is influenced by her extensive travels, and Asian craft, aesthetics and spiritual traditions.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Wegner, Peter; Chasin, Noah; Huldisch, Henriette; Koethe, John; Pollan, Michael (2007). P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R. GRIFFIN Editions. ISBN   978-0-9704427-6-5.
  2. ↑ "BIO – P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R". peterwegner.com. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
  3. 1 2 3 4 Design, Erskine. "Frieze Magazine | Archive | Archive | Peter Wegner". frieze. Archived from the original on September 30, 2015. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  4. 1 2 "D65 series – P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R". peterwegner.com. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Finkel, Jori (May 22, 2011). "Peter Wegner at Stanford: The art of innovation". Los Angeles Times. ISSN   0458-3035 . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  6. 1 2 "In Focus: Peter Wegner | Features | Archinect". archinect.com. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  7. ↑ Nichols, Matthew Guy (October 2004). "Peter Wegner at the Bohen Foundation". Art in America.
  8. ↑ Chasin, Noah (July 2005). "Reading Room". ArtReview.
  9. 1 2 "10 Questions for Peter Wegner" . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  10. ↑ "THE UNITED STATES OF NOTHING – P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R". peterwegner.com. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
  11. 1 2 3 "HELL-WHISKEY-GUNS-MUD-MICHIGAN – P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R". peterwegner.com. Archived from the original on January 28, 2016. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
  12. ↑ "COLOR WHEEL series – P,E,T,E,R,W,E,G,N,E,R". peterwegner.com. Retrieved October 13, 2015.
  13. ↑ Nix, Nada, Nameless: Peter Wegner at TEDxEast , retrieved September 30, 2015
  14. ↑ "Peter Wegner's Buildings Made of Sky" . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  15. ↑ Wegner, Peter (January 1, 2010). On, Off, Via, Verssus, Beside, Beyond, Despite, Concerning & up Against (First Printing ed.). The CU Art Museum University o. ISBN   9780982943106.
  16. ↑ Wegner, Peter (January 1, 2009). Peter Wegner: Terra Firma Incognita. Berkeley, CA: Peter Wegner Studio, Griffin and Galerie m. ISBN   9780970442772.
  17. ↑ "LEVER LABYRINTH | Leverhouse". leverhouseartcollection.com. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  18. ↑ "In Focus: Architecture (Getty Center Exhibitions)". getty.edu. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  19. ↑ "Archiv – Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig". mdbk.de. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  20. ↑ Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art. "Skyscraper: Art and Architecture Against Gravity | MCA Chicago". www2.mcachicago.org. Archived from the original on September 29, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  21. ↑ "Exhibitions + Events | How Wine Became Modern: Design + Wine 1976 to Now". SFMOMA. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  22. ↑ "Exhibitions + Events | The More Things Change". SFMOMA. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  23. ↑ "Peter Wegner: Wall-To-Wall-To-Wall". Cuartmuseum.colorado.edu. Archived from the original on June 17, 2012. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  24. ↑ "archiTECHtonica". Cuartmuseum.colorado.edu. Archived from the original on June 17, 2013. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  25. ↑ "Orange County Museum of Art | OCMA – Richard Diebenkorn: The Ocean Park Series". OCMA. May 27, 2012. Archived from the original on November 22, 2010. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  26. ↑ "MoMA.org | Interactives | Exhibitions | 2008 | Machine for Living Color | Index". www.moma.org. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  27. ↑ "Exhibitions + Events | 246 and Counting: Recent Architecture + Design Acquisitions". SFMOMA. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  28. ↑ "Exhibitions + Events | Cut: Revealing the Section". SFMOMA. June 8, 2008. Retrieved May 21, 2013.
  29. ↑ "Dunedin Public Art Gallery".
  30. ↑ "Lever House".
  31. ↑ Archived October 16, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  32. ↑ GbR, Beutin & Günther. "Von der Heydt-Museum Ausstellung: Amerika – Europa: Ein künstlerischer Dialog – Sammlung Rosenkranz im Von der Heydt-Museum". kunst-und-kultur.de. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  33. ↑ "YALE UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY". media.artgallery.yale.edu. Archived from the original on July 15, 2015. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  34. ↑ "SFMOMA | SFMOMA | Exhibitions + Events | Calendar | Of the Moment: Contemporary Art from the Permanent Collection". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  35. ↑ "Art in General". artingeneral.org. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  36. ↑ Wright, Lesley C (January 1, 1999). Re-structure: [exhibition] 25 September-11 December 1999, Grinnell College Art Gallery, Bucksbaum Center for the Arts. Grinnell, Iowa: Grinnell College Art Gallery. OCLC   43437515.
  37. ↑ "Joachim Pissarro – Hunter College". hunter.cuny.edu. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  38. ↑ "SFMOMA | SFMOMA | Exhibitions + Events | Calendar | Art of Four Decades: 1958 – 1998". San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved September 27, 2015.
  39. ↑ "Palazzi fatti di cielo". Il Post. January 12, 2015. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  40. ↑ Lobe, Adrian. "'Ich erkunde den urbanen Irrgarten' – Wiener Zeitung Online" . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  41. ↑ Stinson, Liz. "The Secret Cities Hidden Between NYC Skyscrapers". Wired. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  42. ↑ "These Mind-Bending Pictures Turn Manhattan's Sky into Skyscrapers". Bloomberg.com. February 10, 2014. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  43. ↑ "Do You Recognise This Skyline?". The Huffington Post UK. January 25, 2014. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  44. ↑ "Exhibitions: Architecture in Photographs | FORM Magazine" . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  45. ↑ "Peter Wegner's Buildings Made of Sky | Magical Urbanism". www.magicalurbanism.com. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  46. ↑ L'Eglise, Fanny (January 10, 2015). "Arch Aujourdhui" (PDF). Peter Wegner. Retrieved January 10, 2015.
  47. ↑ "Peter Wegner – Reviews – Art in America". Art in America. September 18, 2009. Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  48. ↑ Merjian, Ara H. "Cut: Revealing the Section" . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
  49. ↑ "The Listings: Sept. 2 – Sept. 8". The New York Times. September 2, 2005. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved September 29, 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.