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Roland Petersen — Biography
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Born |
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Roland Petersen is a Bay Area painter whose paintings from the 1950s and '60s are masterful syntheses of gestural abstract expressionism, painterly realism, and advanced color theory. His work integrates still life, figures, and landscape into complex, architectonic compositions that are beautiful and enigmatic, but still retain a strong sense of place, in this case the fields and farms of California's Central Valley. According to curator Bruce Guenther, Petersen's paintings are "shatteringly still and exude an irrevocable solidity that is both timeless and yet locked in a specifically transitory milieu."
In his early works, Petersen merges pure abstraction and formal analyses of color and space with figural and landscape elements, a reflection of his interest in post-Impressionist geometry, specifically as practiced by Paul Cézanne and Georges Seurat. Petersen's extraordinarily sophisticated palette, a striking and brilliant combination of light and dark hues that uses white "as an editing tool … to control the eye's journey of discovery," is informed not only by the color theories of Georges Seurat and Hans Hofmann but also by the emotional expressionism of Vincent Van Gogh, as well as the French symbolists.
In the 1960s, while teaching at the University of California, Davis, Petersen embarked on his highly acclaimed Picnic series. Inspired by patterns of light and color that he observed at an annual faculty picnic, these works center on a single female figure or a group of figures surrounded by various still life elements set against a pattern of bright colors and sharp California light. With their saturated colors, thick layered pigment, and geometric compositions, these works bring to mind the gestural brushwork of Bay Area artists David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, who radically revitalized figurative painting in the Bay Area after World War II. Towards the end of the decade, due to an allergic reaction to oil pigments, Petersen abandoned oils for acrylics. However he continues to explore the same set of formal and emotional concerns today.
Born in Denmark, Roland Petersen studied art at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1940s. After graduating with a Masters in 1950, Petersen went to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to spend a year studying with Hans Hofmann. An active figure in the Bay Area art scene for over forty years, Petersen has taught generations of artists not only painting but also printmaking and photography. Hired as one of the first two professors in the nascent art department at UC Davis in 1956, Petersen stayed for thirty-seven years, stewarding the program and recruiting significant artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, and Robert Arneson to the faculty. At 76, Petersen lives in the Bay Area and continues to paint actively.
Petersen's work has been exhibited in museums and galleries around the country, and is represented in major museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; Oakland Museum of Art; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; and Philadelphia Museum of Art. |
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