Ben and Steve
01.03.2018 - 10.04.2018
Press release
Askeri Gallery presents the exhibition of Peter Opheim "Ben and Steve".
New York artist Peter Opheim began his professional career as an abstractionist, but his creative searching led him to figurative images in sculptural and pictorial form.
“I wanted to paint things that I hadn’t seen before, things that didn’t exist except in my imagination,” - the artist explains.
Opheim’s funny characters are well known around the world, and Askeri Gallery will show them for the first time in Moscow this March.
Peter Opheim’s heroes are bizarre creatures that resemble animals or cartoon characters. The artist makes small sculptures of colored polymer clay, and then creates portraits of his characters on canvas. With the help of supernatural brightness and distorted proportions, Opheim reveals the work of children's consciousness, which enters adult territory, remaining in its own illusions. A series of paintings and sculptural objects is a subtle ironic study of the world of children's fantasies, which become the basis for the human personality’s formation.
Peter Opheim was born in 1961 in Landstuhl (Germany). He grew up in Minnesota, studied Oriental studies and Economics at the St. Olav Institute. Lives and works in new York. Opheim's works are in the collections of a number of museums in the USA, Germany, Japan and South Korea, private collections of large corporations. The artist was awarded the Pollock/Krasner Foundation Grant.
The exhibition will last from 1 to 31 March.