Peter Cain
Peter Cain
June 24, 2017
10:00 am - 6:00 pm

Matthew Marks Gallery
1062 N Orange Grove Ave, Los Angeles CA 90046


Matthew Marks is pleased to announce Peter Cain, the next exhibition in his galleries at 1062 North Orange Grove and 7818 Santa Monica Boulevard. Cain’s first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles since 1990, it features paintings, drawings, and collages made between the late 1980s and 1997, when the artist died of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of thirty-seven.

Peter Cain first achieved fame in the early 1990s for his paintings of distorted automobiles. Rendered with precision, their gleaming surfaces intensified the seductiveness of the advertising images on which they were based. A critic at the time called them “literal and figurative icons of autoeroticism.

In 1995, in a departure from the cars, Cain began a new series of paintings. Each composition — part figure study, part landscape — depicts his boyfriend Sean’s reclining head and shoulders on a beach. These new works signaled, in the words of critic Peter Schjeldahl, “the creation of a new high style able intelligently to capture intimate nuances of contemporary Eros on a public scale.”

This exhibition celebrates the publication of Peter Cain, the first complete monograph on the artist’s work, featuring essays by Beau Rutland, Richard Meyer, and Collier Schorr, and illustrated with over eighty full-color plates of Cain’s paintings and works on paper, as well as photographs of his studios and other archival material, most published here for the first time.


1062 N Orange Grove Ave, Los Angeles CA 90046

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