Collision and Traffic Jam by Peter Saul

I just do what I want and try to make it through life without doing an honest day’s work. I wanted to live without working, and without going to prison. So what are you going to do? Modern art, it’s a blessing.
– Peter Saul

Peter Saul (b.1934) lives and works in Germantown, New York, about a two and a half hour drive north of Manhattan. He goes into his studio around noon every day and works until about 7. His wife, sculptor Sally Saul, has her studio on the first floor, he works upstairs. The couple has been married for more than fifty years.

 

Saul moved to Europe in 1956 and, ironically, was inspired by a Mad magazine that he found in a Paris bookshop. The first exhibits of his works were shown in Paris and New York galleries as early as 1962.

 

When he returned to the U.S. in 1964, during the Viet Nam War, he found a lot of issues, political and social, to portray in his works. Saul’s bold, layered day-glo colors, cartoon figures and caustic humor were, and still are, unique. 

In the 1960s, Saul began to put his skills into printmaking. He worked with Pace Prints for many years. He was given a retrospective at the Pace Gallery in 2017, commemorating his more than fifty years of printmaking. 

 

In 2020, a retrospective of Saul’s work was displayed at the New Museum in New York. In 2021, the New York Academy of Art presented him with the Artists for Artists honor. He was elected to the American Academy of Art and Letters in 2010.

 

 

Peter Saul’s works are included in the permanent collection of MoMA, The Met, the Whitney, the Art Institute of Chicago, MOCA, Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and many other major museums and galleries.

 

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Ammon Rost has been dividing his time between New York and Los Angeles. In 2022 he had a solo exhibit at the Loyal Gallery in Stockholm, Sweden and a group exhibit at the Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami in 2021.

 

Born and raised in Tokyo in 1980, Rost said he was influenced by the Zen-like teaching of some of the anime cartoons he grew up with.

 

“With all my paintings, I try to convey a sense of tenderness.” he said, in an interview in Office. “It has to come from a reflective, slowed down feeling— I think of it as opening up your heart in a way. Sometimes you don't feel like being sentimental or emotional, and we can't get into that channel all the time, or care to. But that's what painting requires from you. Thinking about life, relationships, and the temporality of things. Those feelings have to be in your space so that the lines can be tender in that manner.”

 

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November 15, 2023