Roland Petersen: A Natural Order

Press Release

Hackett-Freedman Gallery presents a rare selection of early paintings and works on paper by Roland Petersen. All of the works in this exhibition, several of which have not been exhibited previously, date from the 1960s, the most prized period of Petersen’s oeuvre.

With their brilliant, saturated colors, thickly-layered pigments, and abstracted figures surrounded by landscape, Petersen’s works are often compared to those of his peers, David Park, Elmer Bischoff, and Richard Diebenkorn, who radically revitalized figurative painting in the Bay Area after World War II. Petersen’s rendering of the crisp Northern California light and his use of a brightly colored palette also parallel subsequent developments in Californian art from the 1960s, which placed an emphasis on invention and optimism. Such traits are evident in the work of Petersen’s fellow University of California, Davis faculty, a group that included William Wiley, Robert Arneson, Manuel Neri, and Wayne Thiebaud.

The exacting geometric structure and sophisticated color theories that underpin Petersen’s work, however, are closely related to the work of his most important mentor, Hans Hofmann. “The Hofmann way of thinking,” Petersen has stated, “crystallized for me a painterly idea that all elements are in a state of flux, and are always balanced against each other—a balance that’s reflected in the composition of a painting.” It is this “flux” that gives Petersen’s paintings their complex depth and vibrating tension.

Many of the paintings on exhibit, such as American Picnic (1961) and Woman in Sunlight and Shadow (1965), are part of Petersen’s acclaimed Picnic series, which was inspired by patterns of light and color that he observed at UC Davis’s annual faculty picnic. Also featured are several exceptional casein on paper paintings. Today, Petersen’s works from the 1950s and 1960s are prized by curators and collectors and have commanded record-setting prices at auction.

Born in Denmark in 1926, Roland Petersen studied art with Chiura Obata at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1940s. After obtaining his MA in 1950, Petersen studied for a year with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown, Massachusetts. One of the first professors in the nascent art department at UC Davis in 1956, Petersen taught at the university for thirty-seven years. At 76, Petersen lives in the Bay Area and continues to paint actively.

Roland Petersen’s work is represented in numerous museum collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Oakland Museum of California; and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hackett-Freedman has published an accompanying exhibition catalog, Roland Petersen: A Natural Order, with text by Susan Landauer.