Denis Peterson

Born in 1948 in New York, Peterson studied at Brooklyn College and later under Philip Pearlstein. He came of age as an artist during the late 1960s and 1970s, years in which both figurative painting and social documentary were unfashionable in the New York art world. His persistence in painting the homeless and the economically marginalised at photographic fidelity was, in that context, a double provocation.

His large-scale canvases of street life in New York subject the viewer to an encounter that smaller paintings would soften: faces and bodies rendered at life-size or larger, with every physical detail of poverty visible, make the usual distance between art and discomfort collapse. The technical illusion forces prolonged looking in a way that a photograph, however affecting, does not.

Peterson has exhibited widely across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and his work is held in private and institutional collections internationally. His insistence on social conscience as the justification for extreme technical labour sets him apart from contemporaries for whom photographic fidelity was an end in itself.