Miles McEnery Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by David Allan Peters. The artist’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery will open on 9 June at 520 West 21st Street and remain on view through 23 July 2022. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue featuring an essay by Adam Milner.

Rooted in the history of early West Coast, abstraction Peters’s brilliantly kaleidoscopic works explore color, geometry, intuition, and chance. The artist resists the concept of the “perfect painting” and instead resolves this painterly struggle with his own unique form of creation and elimination. With an interest in pulling things apart and putting them back together, Peters alters his canvases with palette knives and trowels – eliminating the use of paintbrushes as a primary tool for paint application. The application of acrylic paint, chosen for its intense saturation of color, pushes the boundaries of the medium as well as traditional practices of painting.

The base layers incorporate thick abstract compositions, one buried on top of another, with colors spewing from the surface strata leading to the liberation of a more calculated linear depth than seen in previous paintings. “This series of work was made throughout 2021 and winter 2022 and represents my interpretations from these three genres of painting: hard-edge, abstract expressionism and landscape,” the artist states.

“The countless layers of paint have dried, so the artist uses a blade to carefully slice off the globs of excess paint that have accrued around the edges of the panel. Forming the way icicles do, drip by drip, this bulky crust is the residue of each layer of paint extending slightly further than the last, even wrapping around the previous layer ever so slightly. With this bulk removed, the edges of the painting are exposed with a clean slice, revealing the stratified layers of color sitting atop the panel for the first time,” reveals Milner.