Peter Joseph

Lisson Gallery is pleased to present a selection of paintings by Peter Joseph, the artist to have held the longest continuous association with Lisson Gallery, since its inaugural year in 1967. Over the course of his fifty-year career, Joseph was recognized for his early paintings of simple, formally symmetrical shapes in a carefully considered color palette. Joseph’s late-career paintings in this presentation, 2013-2014, highlight the artist’s experimentation with a looser structure and extend a departure from the closed boundaries of his early work.

Often inspired by nature and classical architecture, Peter Joseph approached his paintings with a consistent conceptual practice similar to that of an architect’s abstract. Joseph would start by collaging together small swatches of painted canvas before transferring the small compositions onto restaged, large-scale paintings. The works in the presentation feature angular and biomorphic shapes floating over a neutral ground, which occasionally disintegrate or collapse into semi-translucent ethereal washes.

Peter Joseph had, over the course of decades, dedicated his practice to seeking the potential in constraint. He rose to critical acclaim in the 1970s for his meditative, two-colour paintings, which set one rectangle within a frame of a darker shade. These early works were characterised by perfect symmetry, where every decision about colour and proportion could be seen to be redolent of time, mood or place. While comparable to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Joseph’s was an anomalous strain of Minimalism: his allegiance lay as much with Renaissance masters as with his contemporaries. More recently his format had departed from his established 'architecture' to divide the canvas into two planes, horizontally or vertically, wherein loose brushwork, natural tones and patches of exposed canvas tap into new feeling. As Joseph said: ‘A painting must generate feeling otherwise it is dead’.

Peter Joseph (1929 - 2020) was born in London, and lived and worked in Stroud, Gloucestershire, UK. He has had solo exhibitions at Bernard Bouche Gallery (2018, 2015, 2013); Unité d’habitation Le Corbusier, Briey-en-fôret, France (1998); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, UK (1994) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA (1983). He has been included in major group exhibitions at Sotheby's S|2, London, UK (2018), Kinokino, Stavanger, Norway (2018); FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais, Dunkirk, France (2014); Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Monaco, France (2013); Neues Museum Weserburg, Bremen, Germany (2010); Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (2008); MuHKA, Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp, Belgium (2007); Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland, UK (2005); Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2002); Fundacao Serralves, Porto, Portugal (1999); Kunstmuseum-Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany (1991); Stadtische Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany (1984) and the Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (1977). He won the John Player Painting Competition in 1968.