The Elizabeth Leach Gallery is pleased to present Peter Gronquist: Manifest, featuring new large-scale sculptural paintings and an interactive sculptural installation. The show highlights Gronquist’s interest in excavating personal history through manipulation and exploration of unconventional and found materials. In this inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Gronquist presents two different avenues of material investigation.
The first, the mammoth installation Missoula Floods (2023), is an automaton for making line drawings on sheet metal. In this artwork, a group of boulders connected by chains to a small motor suspended from iron beams is dragged across painted sheets of metal, resulting in rough-hewn, scraped lines etched into the surface. Though constructed from heavy machinery and materials, Gronquist inflects his artwork with a personal poetic: the boulders are sourced from the Columbia River, the artist’s childhood stomping ground.
The bulk of the works on view push the bounds of what can be called a painting - dynamic, wallmounted abstract sculptural assemblages. In these works, the artist manipulates a wide range of materials: polyurethane molded to resemble bone fragments, dyed wasp paper, wool, lace and other textiles, rose quartz, ash, metal, and what are essentially fossilized event posters, painstakingly chiseled from area telephone poles. On all these surfaces the artist applies paint in a soft palette of white, pale blue, blush and orange. The resulting all-over compositions, with jutting shards at odd angles in dreamy-hued colors, are simultaneously evocative of a big bang moment of creation, and a post-apocalyptic moment of destruction. In this liminal space, the artist’s own referents—small doodle-like drawings with personal significance scattered throughout each painting—are glimmers of stardust in the aftermath.
