peter WILDE

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Peter Wilde's, Lives of Others

Throughout his two decades of exhibiting paintings, sculptures, and installation, Peter Wilde has explored the idea of community with equal amounts of enchanted vigour and bemused scepticism.

From early sculptural portraits derived from (intentionally) failed communication strategies, strategies concocted by Wilde himself, to a series of works that sought to assemble loose communities of strangers into idiosyncratic “families” known to the artist -- high school students, his child’s baby sitters, fellow diabetics, his former wife’s fellow women Anglican priests, phone sex enthusiasts, male hustlers and the staged families found in reality television – Wildehas created a vast and varied, teeming lif narrative, the narrative of an artist fascinated by human commonalities and the processes by which strangers become friends

In other words, Peter Wilde was creating social media long before the social media explosion.

Wilde’s current paintings turn the prevalence of social media on its head by examining not how communities are constructed via portals such as Facebook and Twitter, but, rather, how the medium of photography, allegedly a method of capturing the immediate and the real, has worked in tandem with social media to turn self-portraiture into a profoundly inexact science. In Wilde’s explorations, social media does not reflect its subjects, it refracts them, smashes them into uncountable fragments.

Using the self-generated images (of everything from picnics and parties to studio-style “head and shoulder” shots) posted online by Wilde’s former assistant’s 20-something friends -- and only those images made public in 2008 the first year of the social media boom – Wilde has created a body of paintings that show not only a group of attractive young people at play but also a group of young people at play with media itself; a generation of image-based diarists who thrive in a limitless stream of available photographic styles, qualities, compositional and observational strategies (and, obviously, competency) and without any apparent boundaries around intimacy. And, by choosing to replicate found portraits in paint, Wilde adds yet another layer of removal to what is already a self/other, public/private hall of mirrors.

Semiotic twists and turns aside, Wilde’s new works are first and foremost captures of youth in all its glory and foolishness: beautiful youth, wasted youth, youth’s self-indulgence and youth’s nagging insecurity.

Given Wilde’s keen critical gaze (the machinations of social media and the processes of communal self-identification, are, after all, hardly new to this artist), the paintings are surprisingly loving, even tender. Wilde is proving that the more we turn ourselves into instant (and fleeting) objects for casual inspection, the more, conversely, human we remain.

R.M.Vaughan

 

 

 

 

Peter Wilde
Curriculum vitae

Lives and works in Berlin Germany

Education
York University, BFA

Selected Solo Exhibtions

2013 “wilde Merkel”, OPEN Gallery, Frankfurt
2012 “Angela Merkela, Portrait of an Icon”, SLaM Gallery, Berlin
2005 “5 MEN I MET LAST SUMMER”, edaas Gallery, Toronto
2003 “PAINTING HUSTLING”, Internet Site, www.wildestudio.com
1997 Art Gallery of Sarnia, Sarnia
1996 “Normal”, Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery
1995 Galerie Pink, Montreal, Quebec
1994 Mendenhall Gallery, Pasadena, California
Blyth Art Gallery, Blyth
1993 Galerie Pink, Montreal, Quebec
1992 Art Gallery of Northumberland, Cobourg, Guarding
Lake Galleries, Toronto
1991 “Real Women”, Cornwall Regional Art Centre, Oshawa
1989 Lynnwood Arts Center, Simcoe
1987 Lindsay Art Gallery, Lindsay
Artspace, Peterborough

Selected Group Exhibitions

2014 Kino International Kunst, Berlin
2013 Miami Project, Freight and Volume, Miami
Berliner Liste, Freight and Volume, Miami
2012 Scope Miami, Waterhouse and Dodd, Miami
2012 “Broadcast” Funkhaus, Berlin
2005 “IN-SEX”, Spin Gallery, Toronto
“The Chamber”, Gallery 1313, Toronto
1995 Durham Art Fest
1994 Chicago International Art Exposition, Chicago, Illinois
1993 Art Frankfurt, Germany
Chicago International Art Exposition, Chicago, Illinois
1992 ELAAC Art Fair, Montreal, Quebec
Lynnwood Arts Centre, Simcoe, Ontario
First Canadian Place, Art at First
The Robert McLaughlin Gallery, Oshawa, 25 years of Art in Durham
1991 Lake Galleries, Toronto, Christmas Shows
Ashtons Gallery Toronto, Selected Works
1990 The Magic Image, Pickering,. Sculpture, Paintings, Constructions
1989 “8 Artists: A Conversation”, Artspace, Peterborough
1988 “Apropos”, Station Gallery, Whitby
1987 “New Faces”, Artspace, Peterboroug

Collections

Robert McLaughlin Gallery
Kitchener Waterloo Art Gallery
Art Gallery of Sarnia
Art Gallery of Northumberland
Paul Grey (Richard Grey Gallery)
Private Collections USA, Canada, Israel

Commissions

Pentagon, Washington DC
Trinity Anglican Church, Lambeth, Ontario
Bishop Howe, Huron Diocese
St Grace Church on the Hill, Anglican, Toronto
Bethesda Naval Medical Centre, Bethesda, Maryland
Trinity Chapel, Trinity College, University of Toronto
St Johns Anglican Church, London, Ontario
St Georges Anglican Church, Cambridge, Ontario
St Pauls Cathedral, London, Ontario
All Souls Anglican Church, Willowdale, Ontario

 

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