12.15.13 — 01.18.14
Model Questions for the Sun, the See and Other Things…
Peter Fagundo has been challenging his relationship to painting, object making and installation for most of his career. The work has always reflected the intensity of his desires and the clarity of the emotions and influences felt during production. In this most recent body of work, that intensity is filtered primarily through the act of painting and all the requisite factors that will it into being. He’s asking a lot of new and very specific questions here: “what is the palette; a surface; the tools of painting; the narrative?”) These new paintings are assertive but poignant — packed with entanglements, interpersonal gymnastics and the challenges brought on by living and a passionate studio practice. When Peter Fagundo found himself turning 40, cracked open by life and an encounter with an exhibition of Picasso’s Marie Therese Walter portraits, he found a renewed energy that has been feeding his practice ever since. The desire to paint, the desire to experience and the desire to tell stories are all present in this new project.
Peter Fagundo lives and works in Evanston, Illinois. He received his BS in Psychology and Fine Art from Regis University, Denver, Colorado in 1997, and his MFA in painting and drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003 where he was the recipient of the Merit Scholarship. He is a currently a faculty member in the Departments of Contemporary Practices and Painting and Drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at venues including devening projects + editions, Chicago (where he is represented), boom, Oak Park, IL; Hudson Franklin, NY; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Acuna Hanson Gallery, Los Angeles, among many others. He is a curator of ETF (Essential Transmutation Frequency), his home, studio and a space where he curates work from artists whose work interests him and which is presented in direct relationship to a domestic space. He is former co-curator of The Pond, which organized group exhibitions in a storefront gallery in Chicago’s Westtown neighborhood, championing issues of artist’s intentionality, art objects’ discretion and the conversation between makers and viewers.
