Peter Sacks

New Works

Marlborough Gallery

New York, 40 West 57th Street

South African-born and New York-based artist Peter Sacks is known for his mixed-media collages that simultaneously hold traces from his continent-spanning biography and collective histories of places he has resided over the years. His materials range from traditional ones such as wood, metal, and cardboard to residual and mundane objects like fishnets, buttons, and burlap. However, Sacks, who spent studied fine art at Princeton and Yale, orchestrates them into a poetic ambiance that recalls early cutouts of the 20th century European collage and the chaotic fervor of Abstract Expressionism of the ‘40s.

Peter Sacks, Township 5, 2014-2016 Mixed media © Peter Sacks, courtesy Marlborough Gallery, New York

Integrating fabric from India, Europe, and Africa into his practice, Sacks embraces texture and volume. Piled, torn, and stitched, lines and rounds of fabric he brings together elevates the bodily aesthetic of his paintings and works on paper. The earthy and reddish color spectrum Sacks inclines for underlines his naturalist and meditative approach to art making. “The process of making these is so slow and organic – like creating an aftermath or a debris field where you intuit, and sometimes actually make out, the lives of many generations of humans, alongside nonhuman traces, and objects, all laid down under pressure – which take time to make and are filled with that time, pieces of what might have been a larger canvas of handiworks that reference entire lives, whole communities that are brought into the field of the painting, where the painting itself becomes another community,” described Sacks his painting method in a 2014 interview with Natasha Kurchanova published on Studio International. 

New Works will remain on view until May 6, 2017.