Artist's Reception: Friday, May 6, 2011, 5:30 - 7:30 pm

Santa Fe, NM—LewAllen Galleries is pleased to announce Surface Tensions, an exhibition of new paintings by Sammy Peters on view from May 6 through June 5, 2011, at the gallery’s recently renovated Palace Avenue location. At the vanguard of contemporary abstraction, yet deeply rooted in vernacular traditions, the art of Sammy Peters actively re-examines and recombines diverse media and languages of painting in accordance with his works’ sophisticated internal logics. In a complex interplay of collaged papers and patterned fabrics, muted color blocks, calligraphic scribbles, and paint handling as subtly referential as it is boldly gestural, the artist personalizes a bevy of pictorial conventions ranging from decoupage to Abstract Expressionism. Quietly confident, improvisatory, and rigorously understated, his art is especially admired for its unexpected modulations between opacity and translucence, material and image, color and texture – the evocative outcomes of his singular combination of cold wax media, luminous resins, and richly saturated oils refined over more than five decades of a celebrated painterly practice.

Sammy Peters (b. 1939 in Shreveport, Louisiana) earned his arts education at the Arkansas Arts Center School of Arts and Drama, Little Rock University, and the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville. Presented in over seventy solo and group exhibitions, his work has garnered numerous awards and is the subject of several exhibition catalogues. Peters’s paintings continue to experience increasing curatorial and critical attention and are included in a growing number of esteemed public institutions and private collections internationally. The artist lives and works in Little Rock, Arkansas.

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