NEW YORK, NY.- UNIX Gallery presents I Love You, a visual affirmation of the connection between art and our emotional needs and desires by artist Peter Anton. Featuring new sculptural works inspired by delectable foods I Love You marks the first solo exhibition at UNIX Gallery Madison, 1015 Madison Ave. New York, NY, on view from February 4 – March 9, 2016.
Peter Anton is known for his uncanny ability to create art that can lure, charm, tease, disarm and surprise. He uses new sculpture techniques and materials to alter and overstate foods to give them new, delicious meanings. Anton employs humor, scale, irony, and intensity to make foods aesthetically pleasing and seductive in atypical ways. Viewers are faced with concepts of necessity and desire, stimulated by his subject matter.
“The gallery will be enveloped and embraced by a red, velvety cocoon of love and fanciful candies,” says Anton, whose larger-than-life, mixed-media sculptures of delectable sweets and savory foods will be displayed at various installations throughout the gallery. “It will have the [luscious] feeling of a French boudoir.” Admirers can engage in the heightened pleasures and sensual awareness of the artist’s sumptuous creations.
I Love You includes Anton’s monumental-sized, hyper-realistic boxes of chocolates, donuts, cakes, frozen treats, and other tempting “edibles.” His sculptures are crafted from carefully selected, manipulated materials, including resin, metal, wood, clay, and acrylic and oil paints. “With heightened color and exaggerated forms, my work promises the unattainable in life: ultimate satisfaction,” says Anton. “Food evokes a sense of well-being and is an important part of the special memories in our lives. I like to create art that can lure, charm, tease, disarm, and surprise. The sensual nature of the works stirs desire, passion, obsession, and indulgence. I activate the hunger people have for the things that give them pleasure.” Anton explores ways to activate the hunger the public has for pleasurable things and forces them to surrender to an innate, universal reverence for that which we consume.
The artist is also known for his 2012 Art Basel Miami installation SUGAR & G0MORRAH. The interactive sculpture was the world’s first art installation where the viewer rode through an exhibition aboard an amusement ride. The immersive exhibition took visitors on an actual roller coaster ride winding and snaking through a destructed city with tumbling pillars, fire and skeletons juxtaposed with larger-than-life sculptures of sugary treats and nearly nude live models.
Anton has exhibited in numerous museums, including a solo show at the Netherlands’ Museum Jan van der Togt in Amstelveen. As well, Anton has participated in group exhibitions at the William Benton Museum of Art in Storrs, Connecticut; the Museum Villa Rot in Burgrieden-Rot, Germany; the Austin Museum of Art in Texas; the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers, New York; the Fresno Metropolitan Museum in California; the Nicolaysen Art Museum in Casper, Wyoming; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; the Castellani Art Museum, Niagara, New York; COPIA Museum in Napa Valley, California.
Forbes magazine’s 2014 "artist to watch," Peter Anton’s work is in numerous private, corporate, and public collections including the collections of President Bill Clinton, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art; Siemens AG; Sir Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony; Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones; the Jordanian Royal Family; architect Lord Norman Foster; Oppenheim Bank; The Blackstone Resort Hotel in Korea; Breitling Watches; Raymond James Financial; candy maker giant Perfetti Van Melle; the Portland Museum of Art; The Dennis Hopper Collection; and Susanne & Wolfgang Porsche.
Peter Anton lives and works in Connecticut.
