Gowanus, Vienna
Gowanus, Vienna
by Peter Maslow
Lobby Gallery
1155 Avenue of the Americas
(between 44th and 45th)
February 14 - May 12, 2013
Opening Reception:
Thursday, March 14th, 6-8 p.m.
Artist Statement:
Peter Maslow's recent paintings reveal his experiences within a multitude of urban environments and various frames of time.
He has traveled extensively across Central and Eastern Europe, photographing, sketching, absorbing and processing. "I could look at a building's façade and determine the time, history, political climate, artistic trends, the battle between the vernacular versus cosmopolitan in architectural styles - and I would incorporate these as elements and arguments in my paintings. The paintings would be like a kinetic montage of glimpses of a hundred years of wandering through these places experienced and remembered."
Though he was "painting about romantically far away kingdoms," he was using the remembered and embodied maps of his childhood. "I may have been looking up at some fancy cornice in a foreign city, but I was treading the streets and back alleyways, and clambering over the rooftops of Midwood - or even more significant, the wider neighborhoods of my coming of age years: the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx, too. The dark edginess of late 80s and early 90s NYC. Streets matter more to you when you've faced loss on them."
For the last six years, his studio in Industry City - down below the Gowanus Expressway - has both freed and contained his work, as time and space have looped around and fused themselves together on his canvases. "Memories of foreign travels overlay my home town like fantasies. This is a continuous tension in my mind and a central interest in my painting. Memory, cognizance, perception all interweave as overviews. But the painting only works if it's a blow to the gut and a disorientation to the mind."
