Peter Sacks: Tipping Points
Lower Gallery
July 17 - September 12, 2020
"I'm very aware how perilous our moment is. How we may well have irrevocably passed several tipping points. But what I am finding, in making these, is some strange balance within the tipping point. Can you have something that seems to be tipping, and yet seems to be achieving a kind of balance? How does that correspond to one's feelings of exhilaration or wonder or awe at these forces, and how does that balance with dread or fear or sorrow?"
Peter Sacks
"... One of the most exciting painters in America."
New Yorker, March 2019
Peter Sacks was born in 1950 in South Africa and lived there for the first 20 years of his life, followed by studies abroad, which led him to the United States. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Bonavero Institute for Human Rights at Oxford, and the collection of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, among others.
Sacks' paintings explore the colliding recalcitrant energies of collage - what he has called "putting the traction back in abstraction"- and its many layers work to awaken our "optical unconscious." We will exhibit a selection of Sacks' works, which the artist speaks of as "trying not to abandon our faith in beauty in the face of atrocity.”