American painter Peter Saul presents a new exhibition at Gladstone Gallery in New York City that reexamines art history through his characteristically irreverent lens. Titled Peter Saul’s Art History, the show marks the artist’s first solo presentation since joining the gallery last year.
The exhibition gathers 20 new and historical works. Throughout the presentation, Saul’s exaggerated, cartoon-like style intersects with the legacies of major 20th-century figures including Salvador Dalí, Willem de Kooning, Marcel Duchamp and Pablo Picasso. As a result, the show positions Saul’s work within a broader dialogue that spans Pop Art, Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism.
A radical reinterpretation of Guernica
One of the exhibition’s central works is “Little Guernica ‘Liddul Guernica’” (1973), Saul’s distorted reinterpretation of Picasso’s iconic anti-war painting Guernica. The work appears publicly for the first time in four decades.
Saul reshapes the original composition through swollen figures and exaggerated forms. Consequently, the piece retains the anti-fascist symbolism associated with Picasso’s work while amplifying it through Saul’s anarchic visual language. The artist’s reaction to the political climate surrounding the original painting also informed a second Picasso-inspired work he created in 1977.
Satirical dialogue with twentieth-century icons
Elsewhere in the exhibition, Saul revisits several canonical works from the twentieth century. For instance, he references Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, de Kooning’s Woman I and Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory.
While these reinterpretations appear playful, the gallery frames them as deeper critiques of artistic legacy. As the gallery noted in a recent statement: “While Saul’s homages to Western art history may seem like simple flexes in technical proficiency, they each reflect a deeply nuanced understanding and criticism of 20th century history and its heroes.”
Peter Saul’s Art History remains on view at Gladstone Gallery through April 18.