Summary<\/p>\n
American artist Peter Saul has opened an exhibition of new and historic works at New York\u2019s Gladstone Gallery
\nThe show features 20 works inspired by 20th century icons, including Salvador Dal\u00ed, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso<\/p>\n
Peter Saul<\/a> has carved<\/a> out his own place among the greats with bold, cartoonish paintings that chew on absurdity of American life and politics. Now, in an art-history themed show at Gladstone Gallery in New York, the veteran artist turns his gaze toward the modern masters.<\/p>\n The show, titled Peter Saul\u2019s Art History marks\u00a0his first solo outing since since joining the gallery last year. With 20 new and historic works on deck, the exhibition spotlights Saul\u2019s irreverent style \u2014 somewhere between Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism \u2014 as it becomes one with the legacies of Salvador Dal\u00ed<\/a>, Willem de Kooning<\/a>, Marcel Duchamp<\/a> and Pablo Picasso<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n Anchoring the exhibition is \u201cLittle Guernica \u2018Liddul Guernica\u2019\u201d (1973), a bold, swollen reimagining of Picasso\u2019s 1937 anti-war masterpiece. On view for the first time in 40 years, the painting channels the Spanish painter\u2019s anti-fascist symbolism with Saul\u2019s own anarchic panache. Shaken by the political climate in which the original \u201cGuernica\u201d emerged, the piece reflects Saul\u2019s own unease, leading him to revisit the historical gravity in a second Picasso-inspired painting in 1977.\n<\/p>\n Elsewhere around the gallery, Sal riffs on canonical works like Duchamp\u2019s \u201cNude Descending a Staircase No. 2\u201d (1912), de Kooning\u2019s \u201cWoman I\u201d (1950) and \u201cThe Persistence of Memory\u201d (1931) by Dal\u00ed, each as acidic as the next. \u201cWhile Saul\u2019s homages to Western art history may seem like simple flexes in technical proficiency, they each reflect a deeply nuanced understanding and criticism of 20th century history and its heroes,\u201d the gallery wrote in a recent press statement.\n<\/p>\n