Making Room: Works from the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art Collection

Peter Chevalier was born in Karlsruhe, Baden-Württemberg, Germany in 1953. His work has been characterized as a contemporary form of surrealism or symbolism, with the writer Stephen Barber describing his paintings in a 1991 catalog essay as “instruments of astonishment.” In the mid-1980s, when Untitled (Pear, Cucumber, Orange) was created, the artist Ernst Busche drew attention to his handling of oil paint, praising his distinctive “dry-painted, porous” surfaces that “almost look like pastels.” A graduate of the Braunschweig University of Art, Chevalier received the Sprengel Prize from Hanover’s Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung foundation in 1985. From 1992 to 2019, he was a professor in the art department at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. His art has been featured in many museums and galleries including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Luhring Augustine & Hodes, New York, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Studio d’Arte Cannaviello, Milan, Gallerie Volker Diehl, Berlin, and the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe. Chevalier is currently based in Berlin and Stuttgart.