Significant Bay Area Artist Celebrates Seventy Year Career
Roland Petersen (b.1926)
In Perspective
Find out what's happening in Burlingame-Hillsboroughfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
At:
The Studio Shop Gallery
Find out what's happening in Burlingame-Hillsboroughfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
244 Primrose Rd
Burlingame, CA
May 6 – 30, 2016
Artist reception Friday, May 6, 6:00 pm
Roland Petersen has had an amazing career spanning seven decades as a painter and professor of art at UC Davis. While a member of the renowned UC Davis art faculty, 1956 - 1992, he was surrounded by luminaries such as Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, Robert Arneson and William Wiley. Petersen's signature style of bright color, perspective and still life began with his Picnic series in the early 60s and he is still going strong.
Petersen’s endless feasts of geometry, color and form appear on canvas as masterful syntheses of gestural abstract expressionism, painterly realism, and advanced color theory. His work integrates still life, figures, and landscape into a “push-pull” modernist approach learned from Hans Hoffman. Petersen’s artwork is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney Museums, NY.
Throughout his development as an artist, Petersen has demonstrated how intelligence and invention can generate a series of works that have sustained both their formal interest and thematic depth across time. Now 90 years old, he is poised to keep moving forward and if anything his art is clearer and brighter than ever. There is a great deal to admire in the sustained inventiveness of Roland Petersen’s art and in his long and productive life: both are beautiful things to behold.
