peter gronquist

Peter Gronquist is a multi-disciplinary artist working in diverse mediums and materials ranging from video and painting, to sculpture and site-specific installations in our natural and built environment. whether harnessing the wind itself with a massive, silver monochrome flag rippling in the middle of the desert, or activating the soft, penumbral glow around an industrial lighting fixture, gronquist always leaves behind a record of frozen yet fleeting moments charged with his own personal subjectivity.

He has long since dispensed with a single signature style in favor of the query or search, itself. that is to say, in lieu of an ongoing series of uniform structures and ensembles with a consistent autographic aesthetic, gronquist pursues fluidity & flexibility as a first principle; he is constantly stalking the perfect material fusion of form and concept in a state of low-grade vigilance, searching for exploitable disjunctions in their temporal collision.

Gronquist’s paintings, for example, are defined by simple gestural strokes that slash the pictorial field, simultaneously evoking triumphal ab-ex mark-making as well as the more subtle interventions of minimalist practitioners such as lucio fontana. by hewing closely to the bare minimum of color and line, gronquist is able to sidestep the more grandiose and bombastic legacy of his predecessors in favor of a slight disruption or disturbance in his visual field.

He is continually fascinated by the way reflected natural light and projected man-made light interact and inform each other, creating otherworldly vibrations that hover and oscillate just above the picture-plane. throughout his career, gronquist has employed aluminum, ceramic, paint, fabric, mirrors, basic lumber, led lighting systems, virtual and augmented reality to challenge reductive notions of the traditional and modern. based in portland, oregon, gronquist draws inspiration from the pastoral sensibility and rural backdrop of the pacific northwest to create work inflected by a sense of rough poetry and impermanence. -david c. hunt