COURTESY VENUS OVER MANHATTAN
Peter Saul, the seminal pop artist who was represented by the now-shuttered Mary Boone Gallery in New York since 2012, is now represented by two galleries in the city: Venus Over Manhattan and Michael Werner, which also has spaces in Märkisch Wilmersdorf, Germany, and London.
Neither Venus Over Manhattan nor Werner, which began representing Saul in 2013, has yet to announce its next show with the artist. Saul’s work will be on view from September 20 through January 26, 2020, in a retrospective called “Peter Saul: Pop, Funk, Bad Painting and More” at Les Abbattoirs, a museum in Toulouse, France.
Saul had four solo shows with Mary Boone in New York, as well as a two-person outing of drawings with kindred spirit Jim Shaw, and he was featured in solo booth by Werner at the 2018 ADAA Art Show in Manhattan in cooperation with Boone. In a conversation with Saul published by Iris, Boone described him as “a master” and “a forward thinker.”
Werner first worked with Saul in 2013, at its since-closed VeneKlasen/Werner space in Berlin, and hosted a solo show of the artist’s work at its London branch in 2016.
In March of 2015, Venus Over Manhattan hosted a survey of 21 of Saul’s works from the 1960s and ’70s in a show titled “From Pop to Punk.”
Saul was born in 1934, and is best known for vibrant satirical expressionist paintings that blend Surrealist influences and pop-cultural references through a Bay Area Funk sensibility. Often overtly provocative, he described his own work as “humorous instead of menacing” to ARTnews when interviewed about his 2015 Venus show.
When speaking of his headspace as he created his dark works during those two decades, Saul said in that interview that he wanted modern art “to have juice, you know what I mean? I wanted it to have weird stuff going on.”