Artist: Peter Saul

This Spring, Saatchi Yates welcomes legendary artist Peter Saul to their London gallery, for a solo exhibition organized in collaboration with his New York gallery, Venus Over Manhattan. This presentation shows Saul turning his satirical gaze onto the art world itself, exploring and deconstructing the contemporary art market through bold and colourful figures. Vivid and exaggerated, Saul’s cartoonish characters offer a tongue-in-cheek critique of how art is consumed and glorified, challenging viewers to rethink the narratives surrounding art and the artists behind it.

In a career spanning more than six decades and around 800 paintings, Saul is celebrated for his vibrant and provocative style that fuses elements of Cubism, Surrealism, and Expressionism. Today, Saul continues to create worlds born from grotesque exaggerations and unapologetic social critique. Saul’s practice holds up a mirror to the art world, questioning the seriousness with which the art world regards itself, exposing the ego and economics that shape it. Spanning his 60-year career, this exhibition- featuring works from the 1960s to 2024- continues his witty analysis of the industry's politics, mechanics and art history.

In Bad Day at the Gallery (2023), Saul paints a chaotic vision of the art world: three frantic dealers scramble amid swirling cash and mishandled paintings. Abstract canvases are haphazardly nailed to the walls as the dealers twist into a tangle of limbs, each wrestling with art, money, and one another. One hammers cash to a colleague’s forehead, another grips a hammer in his teeth, while a third triumphantly points to a dollar bill pinned to the wall as if it were the true masterpiece. With razor-sharp humor, Saul skewers the cozy marriage of culture and commerce-a recurring theme in his work where the line between art and profit dissolves into absurdity.

In Woman Artist Painting Three Pictures at Once (2021), Saul reinvents the studio painting with flamboyant wit. A green-haired artist flings paint across the room in a chaotic display while wielding brushes in her hands, mouth, and even under her arm. She juggles three canvases, evoking Minimalism, yet her energetic gestures channel Abstract Expressionism, creating a playful clash of styles. In classic Saul fashion, bold color and irreverent humor collide with art world tensions—she punches one male assistant while another cowers under flying pigment, humorously subverting art history’s male-dominated myths.

Across a lifetime of channeling the absurd, Saul’s signature mix of humor and critique remains vivid on the canvas. His works can be found in permanent museum collections around the world including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Jack S. Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, TX; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others.

Praise for Peter Saul

“Firebrand painter, lifelong abstract art denier” - Roberta Smith, Co-chief art critic, The New York Times

"[An] American aesthetic rapscallion...it takes time to become aware of how well Saul paints." - Peter Schjehldahl, Chief Art Critic, The New Yorker

“Sensationally (or perversely) well-painted and visually organized ”- J. Hoberman, Critic and academic

“A classic artist’s artist, one of our few important practicing history painters and a serial offender in violation of good taste” - Holland Cotter, Co-chief art critic,The New York Times

“A bold testament to political pop art” - Nadja Sayej, The Guardian

“Deceptively potent” - Max Lakin, Financial Times

ABOUT PETER SAUL

Peter Saul (American, b.1934), is celebrated for his satirical commentaries on political, social, and historical events in American history. Born in San Francisco, Saul attended the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco and received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Saul began his career during the height of the Abstract Expressionist movement in post WWII Europe. While he appreciated the aesthetic of this painterly style, he did not share a belief in the existentialist themes that supported the work. Instead, the artist created his own unique rhetoric, painting humorous figures using bright colors, controversial subject matter, and animated, often grotesque forms that grabbed the viewer’s attention.

His commentaries on American culture contributed to the formation of proto-Pop, a predecessor to the Pop movement that would later dominate the art scene in the 1950s and 1960s. From 1956 to 1964, Saul lived throughout Europe, an experience that influenced his development as an artist. In Paris, Saul met the Surreal- ist painter Roberto Matta (Chilean, 1911-2002), who would influence his own Surrealist aesthetic. He was also introduced to the American art dealer Allan Frumkin, who would go on to represent the artist for more than 30 years. The breadth of subject matter in Saul’s work has ranged from scenes of World War II and the Vietnam War, to commentaries on the Civil Rights and Feminist movements, to depictions of the artist himself attacked by the forces of the world around him.