Peter Saul “Six Classics”

Mary Boone Gallery will open at its Chelsea location Six Classics, an exhibition of new paintings by PETER SAUL.

For over sixty years Peter Saul has created compellingly idiosyncratic paintings that skirt the boundary of easy classification. Politics, war, religion, history, class, race – Saul’s paintings take on lofty subjects but quickly lose amplitude when met with his deranged compositions, grotesque anatomies, lurid color, and debased humor.

In the current exhibition, Saul re-imagines masterworks from art history. Mindful of his time as an impressionable young artist in Paris in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he favors icons of French academic painting. Alexandre Cabanel’s “The Birth of Venus” (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” (versions at the Château de Malmaison and the Palace of Versailles), Hyacinthe Rigaud’s full-length portrait “Louis XIV” and Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (both in the Louvre), are all subjugated by Saul’s overhaul.

The two-century sweep of American sovereignty is given its due with renditions of Emanuel Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and a painting that portrays a cowboy and his horse having a disastrous run-in with Abstract Expressionism.