Press Release
STO LAT
Online Viewing Room
info@stolat.gallery
+001 646 241 3944
Peter LaBier, ‘Salon de Espera’
December 15, 2021 - February 15, 2022
STO LAT is pleased to present Salon de Espera, a survey of Peter LaBier’s drawing and the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery. Spanning several years and moving fluently between media, this body of work summarizes LaBier’s observational drawing practice.
Punctuated by curiosity and humor, the works on view are studies of the artist’s surroundings—skeptical encounters with his physical setting. Sometimes in painstaking detail and sometimes in gestural suggestion, cult iconography, canonical art historical references and banal life studies populate LaBier’s drawings. Art historical religious motifs—the expulsion, the agony in the garden, and the crucifixion—are venues for iterative experimentation. Familiar daily scenes, pickup trucks, anonymous rooms, and plastic decorations are rendered in alien vision. These subjects are what LaBier calls “stable images''; their authority derives from repetition and distribution, rather than meaning and substance. Viewers have encountered these pieces of inherited visual knowledge before, either because of their ubiquity, fame, or infamy. LaBier’s destabilizing process holds a mirror to these images, revealing the reinforcing processes underpinning recognition. The resulting works address the question of what it means to create pictures in a world not only saturated with images, but where filters, either deliberately placed or subconsciously inherited, are already coded into everything we see and experience.
Peter LaBier (b. 1980) Washington, D.C., lives and works in New York. He received his B.A. from Vassar College in 2003 and his M.F.A. from Columbia University in 2017. LaBier is an interdisciplinary artist working in drawing, painting, music and performance. In addition to his work as a visual artist, he is the founding member of the band Psychobuildings. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States, and internationally in Berlin and Hamburg. Past performances include NADA Presents: Peter LaBier, Mirror Portraits at Skylight Clarkson Square, New York, NY; Performa 17: Brian Belott, People Pie Pool at Abrons Arts Center, New York, NY; In Response: Unorthodox at The Jewish Museum, New York, NY. Recent group exhibitions include The Displaced Image at Ortega y Gasset Projects and All By Myself with Hesse Flatow, New York. Salon de Espera is the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery. You can find out more information about the artist here.
If you are interested in purchasing the featured work or inquiring about additional works by Peter Labier, please call +001 646 241 3944 or email Peter Curtis at peter@stolat.gallery. The exhibition will be on view in our Online Viewing Room December 15, 2021 - February 15, 2022.