PETER GRONQUIST RABBIT
Saturday June 11th, 4-6pm
Artist in attendance
Contact GALLERY@WINSTONWACHTER.COM for more information
Winston Wächter Fine Art is please to present RABBIT, our second solo exhibition with Portland-based multidisciplinary artist Peter Gronquist. In his first in-depth exploration of industrial grade textiles, Gronquist zeroes in on the glitches, anomalies, and irregularities of his chosen materials, which include velvet, concrete, molten aluminum, and felting wool. Working on fabric canvasses, he coaxes unexpected textures and expressions to the surface, improvising and meditating on what it takes to breathe life into something— to care for something until it becomes real.
Gronquist’s latest suite of work takes its cue from The Velveteen Rabbit, Margery Williams’s oft-cited and much-beloved children’s book, who’s generously confiding tone and quirky, offbeat wisdom finds its purest expression in wry, folksy existentialism.
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you…..It doesn’t happen all at once, you become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” – The Velveteen Rabbit
Born 1979 in the United States, Peter Gronquist lives and works in Portland, OR. He attended the School of Visual Art New York and received a BA in painting from San Francisco Art Institute in 2001. He has exhibited in New York, London, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles and Miami. Peter’s work has been published in GQ Magazine, Hyperallergic, Wired and he was recently named one of the top 15 new artists to collect by Business Insider.
