Peter Saul

Peter Saul’s paintings confront the absurdities and anxieties of contemporary life through a highly distinctive visual language defined by exaggerated figuration and expressive colour. Incorporating references from comics, political caricature, popular culture and art history, he constructs chaotic and often grotesque scenes in which humour and violence exist side by side. Emerging in the postwar period, Saul developed a practice that rejected both the restraint of formal abstraction and the detached coolness of Pop Art, instead embracing distortion and excess as a means of reflecting the contradictions of American society. Recurring themes of power, spectacle and conflict unfold through warped forms and densely layered compositions, where parody and aggression operate simultaneously. Influences from Surrealism and Expressionism further heighten the instability of his imagery, allowing absurdity to function alongside sharp political and social critique. 

Peter Saul was born in San Francisco, California in 1934. He attended the California School of Fine Arts in 1950 before earning a BFA from the Washington University School of Fine Arts in 1956. In 1964, he received both the Art in America New Talent Award and the Copley Foundation Award, followed by the Award in Art from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2001. Major solo exhibitions include Peter Saul: A Retrospective at the Orange County Museum of Art, California, which travelled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans (2008); Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More at Les Abattoirs, Toulouse (2019); and Peter Saul: Crime and Punishment at the New Museum, New York (2020). His work has also been included in group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. His work is held in major public collections including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Saul currently lives and works in New York.