Artist Talk with Peter Shear and John Yau

Thursday, January 25 · 6:30 - 8:30pm

The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation presents an Artist Talk with Peter Shear in conversation with the poet and writer, John Yau. They will discuss the ongoing exhibition U+ME: Paintings and Poetry by Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong, as well as a personal correspondence between Peter Shear and Matthew Wong via Facebook Messenger from 2013-2017.

Peter Shear (born 1980, Beverly Farms, Massachusetts) is a self-taught painter known for his deeply hued canvases created on an intimate, human scale. His paintings’ overriding characteristic is a distinct absence of dogma: elusive and spare, they hover in an interstitial space between abstraction and representation, often incorporating elements of both. They can suggest figures, landscapes, or architecture, or simply exist as spontaneous configurations of lines and colors.

In an interview with Studio Critical, the artist talks about how his paintings begin:

"For the genesis of images I’ve often restricted myself to the very familiar—lines, dots, simple shapes. As general and inclusive a vocabulary as possible. It’s become increasingly important to leave behind an image to which no concrete meaning can be attached, only possibility."

Peter Shear currently lives and works in Bloomington, Indiana, and has shown his work across the United States and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at Cheim & Read, New York; Castle, Los Angeles; Fortnight Institute, New York; KOKI Arts, Tokyo; Herron School of Art + Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis, IN; Devening Projects + Editions, Chicago; and A\M Projects, Indianapolis, IN, ATM, Austin, TX.

Group shows include A Game For the Living, Dunes Portland, ME (2023); The Feminine In Abstract Painting, The Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, New York, NY (2023); Real Life, Ilse D’Hollander in dialogue, Galerie Sofie Van de Velde, Antwerp, Belgium (2023); Regarding Kimber, Cheim & Read, New York, NY (2022); Small Paintings, Venus Over Manhattan, New York, NY (2022); A Wild Note of Longing: Albert Pinkham Ryder and a Century of American Art, New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, MA (2021); Downtown, La MaMa Galleria, New York, NY (2021); Adrian, George, Peter, Sofia e Tamina, P420 Galleria, Bologna, Italy (2019); Locus Focus: Peter Shear and Arvind Sundararajan, 840 Gallery, University of Cincinnati, OH (2018); Basic Instinct, Peter Shear and Ellen Siebers, FJORD, Philadelphia, PA (2016); Good Bad Brush: Peter Shear and Matthew Wong, The Occasional Gallery, Burlington, WA (2016).

John Yau is a poet, curator, and critic who has been writing about art since the late 1970s. His most recent book of poems is Tell It Slant (Omnidawn, 2023). His recent monographs and writings on art include Joe Brainard: The Art of the Personal (Rizzoli, 2022) and Please Wait by the Coatroom: Reconsidering Race and Identity in American Art (Black Sparrow, 2023). The exhibition, Disguise the Limit: John Yau’s Collaborations, which was curated by Stuart Horodner, is currently on view at the University of Kentucky Art Museum. A catalogue will be published in March. Yau has written about Matthew Wong’s work for a number of publications, including the catalog, U + ME: Paintings and Poetry by Milton Resnick and Matthew Wong, which accompanied an exhibition curated by Alex Paul Chapin for the Milton Resnick and Pat Passlof Foundation, and for the catalog accompanying the exhibition Matthew Wong | Vincent van Gogh: Painting as a Last Resort, which will open at the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam on March 1, 2024.