Jon Peterson

Jon Peterson (1945 – March 4, 2020) was an American artist, most known for his "guerrilla sculpture" in the 1980s and his stylistically eclectic paintings in the 2000s. He was active in the emergence of Los Angeles's downtown art scene—partly captured in the 1982 documentary, Young Turks—as both an artist and real estate developer. His work has been commissioned by or exhibited at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the San Diego Museum of Art, Washington Project for the Arts, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston Art Festival, Foundation for Art Resources, and the International Sculpture Conference. It has been discussed in Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Village Voice, and recognized by the National Endowment of the Arts. Museum director and one-time Artforum critic Richard Armstrong wrote that his outdoor, urban "Bum Shelters" "neatly grafted function and relevance onto the sadly barren tree of public sculpture"; critic Peter Plagens called them "hand-made, subtly irregular riff on Minimalism" that injected social consciousness into "erstwhile formalist work." Reviewers liken his painting practice in the 2000s to the "polymath"-model of Gerhard Richter, interchanging diverse styles and genres as a means to understanding the nature of painting itself.

Life and career Peterson was born in 1945 in Stillwater, Minnesota. After graduating from the University of Minnesota with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1968, he worked at General Dynamics, Lockheed and Rockwell, at one point designing helicopters. In subsequent years, Peterson and Tansey developed several loft projects in the area, including the construction of a 74-unit complex and the 160-unit Little Tokyo complex.

Peterson exhibited actively after leaving Otis, in solo shows at the Newspace (Los Angeles, 1976–1979) and Protetch-McIntosh (Washington DC, 1980) galleries, and group shows at the Laguna Art Museum (1976), San Diego Museum of Art (1980), Houston Art Festival (1983), Santa Barbara, Washington DC, —and the guerrilla work of artists Maura Sheehan and Judith Simonian. Richard Armstrong described his early work, which included painting, sculpture and installation, as exploring field-situation and body-object relationships and "marked by a consistently cool temperament" toward the effect its non-conventional approaches produced. His "Negentropic Spaces" series (1976) used layered vellum sheets with strings and paint sandwiched between; they alternated between flatness and illusionism and recalled the graphs and structural plans of his engineering background. His "Wall Paintings" (1978–82) were dark, atmospheric and mysterious, like backgrounds of Old Masters paintings with affinities to the art of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In formal terms, critics called them minimal, graceful and interesting; Richard Ross, in one of the earliest uses of the term, described in situ works by Peterson, Sheehan and Simonian as "participatory art" that bore "responsibility to the community." —expanded sculpture into the realm of the practical and gave something back, rather than merely appropriating urban suffering. Peterson explained, "The site alters the art. Put it in a gallery, and it looks expensive—like a work of art. Put it on skid row, and it becomes a throwaway—yet it is only there that the work is truly useful." Peterson initially produced direct, naturalistic domestic images and portraits, whose centrally located figures were often based on appropriated images (including mug shots and street fashion images) and influenced by the paintings of Marlene Dumas and Luc Tuymans. his paintings became more semi-abstract, multi-hued and hallucinatory, with Vuillard- and Bonnard-like landscapes and politically inspired canvasses drawn from newspaper photos (e.g., the Arab Spring- and movie-inspired The Battle of Algiers works) depicting featureless, phantasmagorical figures in disorienting patterned and expressionist environments, as in Springtime (2011).

In 2011, Peterson began the "Via Phyllis" series, based on a portfolio of naïve drawings dated from the 1940s to the 1980s by a woman named "Phyllis T." that he purchased at a flea market. He translates her drawings (of celebrities, friends, dolls) into expressionist images that range from humorous to haunting, freakish or surreal, freely mixing a modernist repertoire of geometric shapes, color field bands, and gestural brushwork. Constance Mallinson describes these enigmatic works as "assisted readymades" that "provoke a tension between Modernism’s grand narratives and the personal idealism and quirky visions of the 'other' as denoted by this young woman."

Peterson's "Ellsworth Kelly Series" (2012–8)—inspired by a photograph of artist Ellsworth Kelly standing next to a messy, paint-daubed wall in his studio—features works that emulate the markings on Kelly's wall as a stand-in for painters and painting itself and sometimes resemble Calder’s hanging mobiles or Miró’s abstractions. These markings evolved into the more abstract "Map Paintings" (2017– ), which return to the grids of Peterson's early work; in these, he imposed what appear as mesh-like architectural structures or street plans juxtaposed with faint human figures through washes, gestural marks, wax lines and vivid thick paint overlaid on concrete-colored grounds.