Peter Saul

Art Brokerage: Peter Saul American Artist: b. 1934. His work, which has connections with Pop Art, figurative art, and Expressionism, became known and somewhat successful in the 1960s. He continues to paint provocative, well-reviewed, and collected paintings. Peter Saul was born in San Francisco, California, and studied at the California School of Fine Arts from 1950 to 1952, and at Washington University from 1952 to 1956, before traveling to Europe, where he remained until 1962. Saul was inspired equally by comic books as he was by the Surrealists and remained an unrelenting critic of various aspects of American culture. In the 1960s, Peter Saul was associated with a group of imagists in Chicago called the "Hairy Who" that disavowed the various New York styles or schools of the moment. Instead they focused on the human image, conflated elements of high and low culture, were extremely anti-authoritative and promoted a particularly intense political critique. A parodist and an absurdist, he comments mordantly on aspects of contemporary life, ranging from art, to politics, to the current infatuation with the past. Using garish Day-Glo colors, he creates often crowded canvases filled with violently caricatured and grossly exaggerated forms, misspelled words, puns and odd perspectives. His works both influenced and were influenced by the underground comic books of the early 1970s.