Peter Schlesinger

“Peter, I thought your show was very beautiful. Each piece seemed alive to me, uncannily so. They were like people I know. One was different from the next, the way one person is different from the next, but also related as all people are. Each seemed to dress differently, too (and I did have the odd feeling that some of them were wearing clothing and took care with their dress!) And they were all so full of touch, so idiosyncratically made by hand, which I think is important nowadays when everything seems deduced from some machined-clean idea.”

—Mark Stevens, Pulitzer Prize winning art critic and author of Francis Bacon: Revelations and De Kooning: An American Master

David Lewis is pleased to present the inaugural exhibition of new and recent sculpture by American artist Peter Schlesinger.

Schlesinger’s ceramic works include figurative sculptures that evoke mythology and fables as well as vessels that refer to ancient forms and enigmatic biomorphic shapes with innovative glazes and textures.

He has exhibited sculptures and paintings at the Hayward Gallery, London, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, and MoMA PS1, New York. His work is in the collections of the Parrish Art Museum, The Farnsworth Museum, and Manchester Gallery of Art, England.

Peter Schlesinger was born and raised in Los Angeles in 1948. After studying painting at the University of California, Los Angeles, he went to London’s Slade School of Art in the late 1960s and early 1970s and began making sculpture in New York in the mid 1980s. He currently resides in New York City.