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PETER WEGNER |
Peter Wegner is an American artist, born in 1963 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He received a BA degree in 1986 from Yale University and first began exhibiting his work in 1997. His art draws attention to systems and language and the ways in which both operate in our visual culture.
49 Greys, is part of an on-going body of work about color in which Wegner’s point of departure is the systems used by paint manufacturers to code, name, and sell house paint. While this glossy, oil on wood painting at first appears to be a monochrome study in hard-edge geometry, upon closer inspection one finds that in the horizontal margins separating the striped bands of gray, words and numbers are inscribed in white on white. These are the paint manufacturer’s names and number codes used to identify the colors on commercial paint chips. As the artist has stated, "It is the poetry of commerce," which he then transforms into a lyrical visual and verbal meditation on the color gray while also calling attention to the commercial system itself. By manipulating a system that facilitates the buying and selling of color, a commodity that seemingly belongs to everyone, Wegner’s painting questions the notion that color can be standardized and reveals the inadequacy of using words to describe things. The shadowy letters and numbers overlap making the reading of these almost hidden words even more difficult: abstract grey, modern gray, cubist gray, gray mood, gray cloud, gray day, stone grey, lead gray, slate gray, misty gray, historical gray, metallic gray, and so on. Combined with the repetitive stripes of shades of gray, this painting is a rhythmic and thoughtful reflection on color and language.
- Jennifer Bayles, Educator for Special Projects