Peter Alexander

Pace Gallery

New York, 540 West 25th Street

This exhibition will feature works created by the artist from 2011 to 2020. This is the first presentation of Alexander’s recent works since his passing in 2020 and his first solo exhibition at Pace Gallery. His work has previously been featured at Pace’s galleries in Seoul and Hong Kong and at Lightness of Being, a dedicated presentation to Light and Space artists at Art Basel Miami Beach in 2018.

Alexander, born in Los Angeles in 1939, rose to great prominence in the 1960s with his cast polyester resin sculptures. Having nurtured a lifelong love of surfing, he used resin to fix his boards for many years. Alexander’s decision to utilize resin as an artistic material in the early 1960s was something of an epiphany. He had poured the material into a Dixie Cup to seal his surfboard, but found that over time the resin hardened into a translucent circle. This realization heralded the creation of Alexander’s iconic polyester resin sculptures that would position him as a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a vanguard of the California Light and Space movement.

Throughout his career, Alexander found inspiration for his art through a multitude of sources, including the landscape of his native California, geometry, the phenomenological effects of color and light, and perspectival nuance. His work has been likened to that of Pace artists such as James Turrell, Mary Corse, and Robert Irwin. He maintained a deep interest in the work of Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, particularly his ability to embed his works with “that certain quality of light, that quality of being under water.” Mark Rothko’s approach to color and mark making also served as a cornerstone for Alexander’s practice, and he once said, “I’ve always loved Rothko and the sensibility [within the edges he creates], so I decided to cast objects that had those kinds of edges that disappeared.”

This surplus of inspiration manifested itself into the translucently meditative sculptures for which he remains best known. In addition to sculpture, Alexander’s practice also spanned painting, drawing, lithography, and polaroid photography. When examining his work in these alternate mediums, the artist’s attentiveness to color becomes incredibly evident. In a 1971 interview, Alexander said, “Part of the concern that I have with color is that a very slight varying color could alter how you felt about it or you felt toward it or the kind of vibrations it sent off.”