Philip Pearlstein
Courtesy of Betty Cuningham Gallery, New York
Pearlstein was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology and received his Masters in art history at New York University. He was a friend of Andy Warhol from college and he accompanied Warhol to Manhattan from Pittsburgh in 1949. Warhol and Pearlstein subleased an eighth-floor walkup tenement apartment on St. Mark’s Place (and Avenue A) for the summer. According to Pearlstein, “The bathtub was in the kitchen and it was usually full of roaches, incredible roaches.” When they moved a few months later to the large front room of dancer Francesca Boas’ loft on West 23rd Street, Warhol sent out address change cards in small envelopes filled with glitter announcing: “I’ve moved from one roach-ridden apartment to another.”
Philip Pearlstein is among the most successful and influential contemporary figurative painters. He was one of the first artists—alongside Alex Katz—to chart a viable figurative path out of Abstract Expressionism.
His characteristic, large-scale studies of nudes in studio settings continue to intrigue with their clarity and poise.
As described by Betty Cuningham Gallery, Philip Pearlstein is “the artist of his generation who understood, and briefly explored, the tenets of the Abstract Expressionists, but whose style and methods of expression led away from the abstract to a more concrete, initialized view of the world and the human body. Over the course of his career, the role of the nude, a mainstay in Pearlstein’s paintings and a primary subject of artists for centuries, has evolved. Pearlstein, an artist fascinated with the visual experience, has taken the role of the nude in painting and shifted the focus away from the body per se. The model resides on the canvas with such odd secular objects as a weathervane, butcher’s sign or Chinese kite, thereby providing the building blocks for the painting. Color, composition and scale are the subjects. Spatial tension claims the spotlight, leaving the viewer to contemplate the implied and subconsciously suggested relationships on the canvas.”
For more works by Philip Pearlstein press here.
