Brooklyn-based painter Peter Sullivan straddles the line between abstraction and figuration in his brightly colored canvases and works on paper. Sullivan imbues relatively banal images, such as street-level views of buildings and parked cars, with an unlikely energy, covering his canvases with erratic, short brushstrokes in vivid colors. These paint marks rely on the careful arrangement of color and negative space to coalesce into identifiable images, yet the configurations seems simultaneously poised to disintegrate into purely abstract forms. Working with both oil paints and gouache, Sullivan exploits each medium to its full potential, emphasizing color in each composition.
Sullivan was born in Winchester, MA and received a BA from Dartmouth College and attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for post-graduate studies. His work was the subject of two solo exhibitions at the prestigious New York gallery Hirschl and Adler Modern and has been collected by such institutions as the Museum of Modern Art, the Fogg Art Museum and the DeCordova Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed by Art in America, The New York Times and The New Yorker.