Extended: Sarah Peters "Being American" until July 27

It had become apparent a while back that we would extend Sarah's excellent exhibition another week, but I'm thrilled to make the official announcement in conjunction with two thoughtful reviews of her show.

First is in a round-up of recent exhibitions by Jeffrey Cyphers Wright in Chelsea Now, titled "Retrofitting the future: Everything that’s old is new again in Chelsea’s galleries":

Black and white also conjures the past in Sarah Peters pen and pencil drawings at Winkleman Gallery. The show, called “Being American,” reflects on early American art, when there was no academy to either nurture the natural talents or cull the amateurs. Consequently, egalitarian efforts ensued, marking our national conscious. While lacking in finesse, there was abundant earnestness and innovation. In paying homage to those nascent efforts, Peters recognizes their limitations as the key to their directness, which she further distills.

Using a lean line, the artist sketches her figures in forests and beneath cliffs. Their isolation mimics the situation of our early painters, thrust into a vast wilderness and cut off from Europe.

A commanding female stares straight out at us from a glen in “The Club.” While her countenance is serene and childlike, we sense a macabre presence. As if to hammer home the foreboding pall, a small, penciled figure of a man with a large club suspended over his head lurks in the background.

The second review is by Roberta Smith in today's New York Times (scroll down a bit):

In her first solo show, Sarah Peters breathes life into an obsession with the art and history of colonial America. The breath comes from a fidgety crosshatch technique rendered in pencil and black ballpoint pen that gives her images both a gauzy drift and an almost fingernails-on-blackboard screechiness.

The gallery explains that Ms. Peters revisits the naïve, often awkward motifs of colonial art to make them more complete or realistic. Thus “Dreamer,” a portrait of a man in the angular style of an itinerant painter, has a trio of voluptuous bikini-clad women in the background, perhaps to show what was really on the man’s mind. “Séance” adds intimations of ghosts, or at least moving curtains, to an image of a flower urn, a traditional mourning motif.

But what Ms. Peters really does is make this world seem crazier, suggesting the thinness of the line between the cooked and the raw amid a general atmosphere of chaos and decay. “Still Life With Battle” shows a compote dish of fruit and a background swarming with tiny figures: naked men armed with clubs. And the show’s tour de force, a 20-foot-long drawing titled “Being American,” shows an Arcadian landscape strewn with columns, portrait busts and neo-Classical statues as well as a woman sculptor, contemplating a nude torso.

Ms. Peters’s precedents include Edward Gorey and the early work of both Jim Nutt and Sue Williams. Her alternately wafting and grating drawing style makes her images feel at once romantic and hard-bitten. They may seem to float through the mists of time, but they have a few scores to settle.

Congrats to Sarah on the awesome response to her first solo show!

Sarah Peters
Being American
June 15 to July 21 July 27, 2007

Winkleman Gallery
637 West 27th Street
New York, NY 10001
T: 212.643.3152
F: 212.643.2040
info@winkleman.com
http://www.winkleman.com/