Modern

Artist: Peter Drake

Notes: Created through a reductive drawing/painting process. Drake mostly works from photos, retro advertisements, and still lifes with vintage toys. This is one of the few (maybe only) purely invented landscapes.

Artist bio:
Peter Drake graduated with a BFA from Pratt Institute.  Drake was appointed Provost in January 2018 and previously served as the Dean of Academic Affairs since 2010 at the New York Academy of Art. Drake continues to be a Thesis Advisor having previously taught at Parsons the New School for Design, the School of Visual Arts, and the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Peter Drake’s art has been featured in 27 Solo exhibitions to date. His work is held in numerous private, corporate and public collections including the Whitney Museum of Art, Phoenix Museum of Art, MOCA LA, Weatherspoon Art Museum and the L.A. County Museum of Art, among others. His permanent public art commission, awarded by MTA Arts & Design features 18 art glass windows and 5 ceramic/glass mosaics installed throughout the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) Massapequa Train Station. It opened to the public in 2015 and is seen by over 6,000 commuters daily.

He is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Award, a New York Foundation Fellowship and is a two-time recipient of the Two Trees Cultural Space Subsidy Program Grant for 2016-18 and 2019-22.

Drake actively lectures and curates. Curatorial projects include Figurative Diaspora co-curated with Mark Tansey, Piss and Vinegar: Two Generations of Provocateurs, Beautiful Beast, a contemporary representational sculpture exhibition, The Big Picture, and Now and Then: Drawings from the 19th Century to the Present, in partnership with the Dahesh Museum of Art.

Drake previously was a curator for The Drawing Center in New York City, wrote for Flash Art Magazine, served as a Board Member for the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc. and was a jurist for Base Istanbul 2017 and the XL Catlin / AXA Art Prize 2018-2021.

Drake maintains a studio in Dumbo, Brooklyn and is represented by Linda Warren Projects, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Artist Statement: "My newest body of work is based on a collection of lead soldiers my father assembled over the course of his life. I was surprised when I inherited them to see how many depicted Arab and North African soldiers. There were Zouaves, Saracenes, Mamaluks and Ottoman Turks. It struck me as strange that we have been demonizing certain cultures forever. That even in child’s play the exotic could take on a menacing and evil aspect.

My first instinct was to look closer. I take macro photographs of the figures with raking light to heighten their effect and to exaggerate the distortions in the figures. I then use the photographs as a starting point for a series of paintings that would be larger than life. The scale is important to me because I want to reverse the roles of viewer and subject and have the toys loom over us. A toy Buckingham Palace guard can tower over the viewer like an equestrian sculpture. The backgrounds have varied from suggestions of landscapes to more familiar still life shelf settings. They can appear almost real and at other times more in keeping with the sculpture as still life tradition.

The most exciting aspect of the blow-ups for me is the ways in which the figures become distorted by scale. Hands and feet appear to have been mangled, the pockmarks of missing paint looks like shrapnel wounds. Faces that seemed acceptable as miniatures become grotesques when enlarged, swords become chain saws, rifles can become candy canes. What was serious appears absurd and the innocent become morbid. Riflemen teetering on their wobbly stands becomes a metaphor for the instability of colonialist thinking and the entire project takes on the feeling of some horrific déjà vu. It’s frightening to think that so much animosity can be embedded in a child’s toy."

Acquisition Details
Date: April 2022
Cost: $1,500
Location: Peter Drake’s studio