Images by Christian Ramirez.
Peter Young: Capitalist Masterpieces
14 December 2012 – 27 April 2013
Young (b. 1940) emerged in New York in the 1960s and quickly rose to prominence on the global art scene. Young exhibited at the Leo Castelli and Noah Goldowsky Galleries (the latter under the aegis of Dick Bellamy), and graced the cover of Artforum in 1971. His work was included in shows at the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, Albright- Knox and Corcoran Museums, as well as the Walker Art Center. Young garnered equal success in Europe, exhibiting with Rolf Ricke in Cologne and at Documenta 5 in Kassel, Germany. Peter Young’s work entered many of the era’s most prominent collections: Robert Scull, Philip Johnson, Horace and Holly Solomon, Joseph Helman, Ben Heller, Peter Ludwig, Arne Glimcher, Roy Neuberger, Bruno Bischofberger, et al. Yet by the time critical attention arrived, the artist had left New York to travel around the Mediterranean, then Mexico, Costa Rica, and the American Southwest settling in Bisbee, Arizona in 1972 where he continues to live and work today.
In 2007 Peter Young’s art was the subject of a retrospective organized by David Deutsch and Alanna Heiss at MOMA PS1 that reintroduced his work to New York. This exhibition included paintings made between 1963 and 1977; that is, paintings that had been shown previously in New York. Many of the paintings in the exhibition have not been seen since the early 1980s when his Grid and Linear Weave series was seen at Leo Castelli and Dick Bellamy’s Oil and Steel Gallery.
The title of the exhibition, bestowed upon the work by the artist, is a playful nod to the fact that Young left the New York art world as a rising star, and travelled the world pursuing knowledge through engagement with indigenous cultures whose economic and social systems aligned more closely with his sense of social justice. He continues this work today, through his activities with humanitarian groups working along the US/Mexican border.