newest 3D piece – Guns or Butter

http://s111.photobucket.com/albums/n129/Peterillig/?action=view&current=P1020166.mp4

newest 3D piece, Guns or Butter,  oil on wood, with electric lights.   Parodies retro signage.

A review from a past show at Pirate, Denver

Whether the art is traditional or contemporary, the painterly techniques being used have changed little in the over 150 years since Manet was working; some contemporary artists rely on even older methods that date as far back as the Renaissance. So the way many realists keep their work fresh is not through technical advances, but choice of subjects. The edgier the subject, the more contemporary the painting — even though the methods used to create it are time-tested.Proximity, a show of Peter Illig‘s latest figural paintings in Pirate’s front gallery, makes the point that realism combined with the unexpected keeps contemporary representational painting relevant.

Over the past five years, Illig has exhibited his neo-pop narrative work in a variety of venues. Typically, he’s shown paintings in which disparate images are juxtaposed à la James Rosenquist and his artistic heirs, such as David Salle; for example, he’s painted women’s faces inserted in an airplane-assembly-plant scene. Although a few paintings in this older style are included, for the most part his pieces at Pirate link separate, single-image paintings together in multipart assemblages, creating an effect similar to what he’d been doing before. Each of these new paintings features straightforward images in an easy-to-read representational style, even if the individual panels are sometimes done in different palettes, or in half-tones; he then hangs two or three works together in a tight cluster.

One such pairing, “Zip Me” and “Moving Target,” is given the most prominent place in the show — the east wall immediately inside the door — so that the paintings are the first things viewers see after entering Pirate. They’re hung so close together that they almost touch one another. “Zip Me,” which hangs to the left, captures a scene right off the cover of a detective novel. On a lurid yellow ground, two figures — a man zipping up a woman’s dress — are seen, with both posed so that they turn away from the viewer. Illig adds a mystery-novel punch to this mundane scene by including a single disturbing detail: The woman is brandishing a pistol. “Moving Target” depicts a different woman, one who’s walking toward the viewer. The expression of concern on her face, her clipped gait captured midstride, and the black-and-white half-tone Illig uses all add to the sense of anxiety introduced by the gun-toting “Zip Me” woman.

In another set of paintings hung on the big south wall, Illig puts “Poet,” a black-and-white half-tone painting of a man surrounded by hanging light bulbs, next to “Cubist Dream,” a Technicolor shot of a woman pulling her blouse over her head, and “Oblique Reference,” another black and white of a woman lying on her back. The ad hoc ménage a trois is charged with sexual energy.

Illig’s paintings are redolent with a multiplicity of interpretations. But the myriad of meanings notwithstanding, there’s little doubt as to his actual topic: men’s sexual attraction to women.

Michael Paglia

Westword

2002

New Collaboration – Plus+Gallery, Denver, CO

“Signifier”, a new piece by Peter Illig, Rebecca Vaughan and Russ Anderson.  5 feet high, steel and mixed media.  Opens in the invitational show “14 Collaborations” at Art Students League of Denver.

This art work now hangs at Plus+Gallery in Denver, though December 2011.

Celestial Navigation – a collaboration

Collaboration w/ Rebecca Vaughan at “Displaced” show, February 2011, Denver CO

Link to Rebecca’s interview:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/open-to-love/

Porn Star Passion Play

http://denverarts.org/exhibits/porn_star_passion_play_new_paintings_by_peter_illig.html

Pirate, Denver CO, 2007

On Peter ILLIG’s art

Neon Memory

For Denver’s Peter Illig, everything is metaphor.

In this, Illig is exposing one of the grand epistemological premises: Humans are inherently meaning-making machines. And in his work and in his life, Peter Illig embodies this notion.

Working with popular American images, Illig is a kind of pop artist. But with his perfunctory canvas calls to yesteryear, Illig is even more of a cultural historian. His interests and subject matter range from art history and everything American – especially anything 20th century. Always with his eyes open in his lifelong drive to constantly discover the details of the world a round him, Illig’s aggressive skill lends him the ability not only to impart all he has found – but to pay homage to it as well.

Since he was younger, Illig has possessed the ability, and fondness therein, to spend time locating the surrealistic components that lay all around us, in this American culture. From billboards to 50’s paperbacks and advertisements of all varieties – Illig’s interest is in compiling these components and presenting them to the 21st century world. Because in all of it, Illig is interested in at least investigating whether there is pungent sociological and cultural relevance to these items of history. Usually, there is.

For Illig, art should be accessible. And his work is no exception. This is not to say that Illig always understands where he is heading – in his strange combining of objects and theories – because he doesn’t. Not always at first anyway. But then again this is the great power and mystery of process and that kind of thoughtful engagement in a project, or a body of work. Illig is not afraid of that process leading him where it may: to a direct and relevant meaning.

Just as Illig works through his content, at times, in-process, or on canvas – a viewer of his work may not understand, or uncover, the meaning of a particular piece at first. But if you spend a little time with a piece – the meaning will surface.

Diligently taking familiar images and theories and pieces of literature from the world around him – Illig pairs the often juxtaposing pieces of experience together. In this alchemical process, it is necessary for viewers to take the time and engage with the piece. But don’t misunderstand: this is not to say that Illig’s work is obscure or entirely abstract. It’s not. On the whole his work is concrete – and relatively easily accessible.

Illig is an ardent believer that everybody should have a connection with art. Afterall, s Illig said, the aim is “to get through to something elevated”. And embedded within all the mediums – music, literature, life or painting – there is that opportunity.

In his quest to find meaning in the material world, Illig has triumphantly succeeded in pushing us all a little further beyond everything material, to the immaterial.

For example, Illig’s “The End of Language” depicts a man climbing over a pile of rubble. For Illig this pile is the history of pop art and 60’s advertising. In this, the character of Illig’s work is also a meaning-making machine; seeking meaning somewhere over the top of that pile of history.

Peter Illig, in conversation and on canvas, speaks to every element of being human. Of seeking, striving, connecting cognitive elements present in our cultural landscape – past and present. In this, Illig’s work is entirely human. It’s almost as if he isn’t even a painter. It’s as if he is something more.

Keep up with Illig’s work through his representative gallery, Plus Gallery: Plus Gallery: Peter Illig.

Denver Syntax

Connection, Peter ILLIG, 2006.   charcoal on paper 42×88″

Peter Illig and Rebecca Vaughan

got hitched

Sharon Feder at Ironton, Denver

by Peter Illig,   Sunday, November 7, 2010

Painter Sharon Feder’s work fills the main gallery at Ironton. The paintings are hung neat and orderly but they reveal nothing less than the hidden tensions of contemporary life.

Oil paintings of quotidian scenes and subjects: commercial spaces, warehouse districts, gas stations. Geometric shapes suggested by old buildings and modern businesses. Muted complex browns and grays, accented by reds and sky blues. Highly personal brushstrokes remind us of the materiality of paint and subject. But these spaces are not what they seem. They stand in for human relationships, analogous to isolation, despair and the constant contradictions of appearance versus truth.

Ostensibly, these are buildings with commercial promise but closed and empty. But let me add, before the reader thinks Feder’s work is negative or cynical, that her sharp vision redeems the spaces, finds the visually exciting composition, color contrast, and implied human narrative that takes our observations of the work to a higher level.  This is not a cold, hard clinical view of the world, but a view filtered through the warm human sensibilities of an accomplished artist.  The starkly cropped view of a scene is modulated by sensuous paint and color combinations. An example: two metal barrier poles in a parking lot, seem like a couple of characters in a play, red and worn, performing their role on a stage of gray and brown, lit from the side.

Familiarity is deceiving. We have seen these places many times; we take them for granted. Feder’s images themselves are not shocking but ring true to our lives, if we are familiar with urban areas. We recognize the shine of glass, painted metal, and the expanses of concrete. It is a distinctly American and Western place. The sunlight that fills the American West strikes obliquely, unmitigated, and a hint of distant hills can sometimes be seen behind the brash metal and concrete. Shadows play a role here. They stretch across the empty spaces, reminding us of the lateness of the day, and the time we have left.

What can we conclude about this series of paintings? Like most art works they are about the inner self — a portrait of the artist’s mind at a certain point in time. Ordered spaces, with exterior layers that show evidence of the passage of time and exposure, but with hints of intimacy and full of surprises.  Interiors that are hidden and unknown. Paradoxes that will remain so.

After looking hard at Ms. Feder’s paintings, I was offered a private glimpse by the artist, in a backroom, of her future series: a new painting that I will not describe here, but offers new, even more complex vision, and direction.

Stay tuned.

‘The Art Of Saming’, Sharon Feder.

through December 4th, 2010,  at Ironton Studios, Denver

http://www.irontonstudios.com/

Video interview – The artist at Plus+Gallery

Denver Art Examiner article on Illig, by Heidi Strang

Peter Illig is a painter with an eye to the sensual aspects of life.

There is an element of pop art in Illig’s paintings – realistically rendered images but often placed in juxtaposition with seemingly random objects. These associations force the viewer to contemplate not only the objects place, but also their own place in relation to those objects. There is almost an audible element to his work – teaming with movement, tension, and vibrancy the viewer is forced to take in several scenes at once. Despite a largely monochromatic palette, the canvases are alive with visual excitement.

He is also innovative in that he wants the viewer to have a personal connection to his prodigious output of painting. On his website, he encourages visitors to print out a reproduction his works entitled “MODULAR DIALOGS” and arrange the images to appeal to their own aesthetic sense.

Illig learned to be generous with his art when he was a child and his father, Carl, a renowned regional painter gave art instruction in their home. Illig’s work spans from small (14 x14) to large, measuring in at thirty-six feet while others as large as sixty-two feet and consisting of charcoal, oil paints, and installations.

Having worked here for over 26 years since his move from New York, Illig has exhibited throughout Colorado and his work is held in private, corporate, and public collections nationwide.

When speaking of the energetic Denver art world, Peter Illig’s name inevitably comes up in conversation.

For further information:
Peter Illig
email: babylonart@aol.com
www.peterillig.com

Heidi Strang, Denver

Action Painting, Peter Illig

Photo by Peter Illig