Born in Chicago in 1934, Irving Petlin was admitted at the age of 17 to the Art Institute of Chicago. In the 1950s, he became the youngest member of the Monster Roster, a group of artists who rejected dominant abstraction and continued to give a prominent place to figuration. He first stayed in Paris between 1959 and 1963, where he reunited with other American artists, including Leon Golub and Nancy Spero. He participated in numerous exhibitions at the Galerie du Dragon and became an active member of the Parisian art scene, associating with Jean Hélion, Alberto Giacometti, Balthus, Max Ernst, and Roberto Matta. He then moved to New York, where he lived for over twenty years, before permanently returning to Paris in 1990. Uncomfortable with rigid borders, he regularly returned to the United States, to his house on Martha’s Vineyard, where he painted during the summer.
A remarkable painter and pastelist, and a great admirer of Odilon Redon, Petlin developed a unique style somewhere between dreamlike expression and surrealism, using vibrant colors to portray a deeply personal universe. Petlin often worked in series, developing major cycles inspired by Johann Sebastian Bach, Odilon Redon, Primo Levi, Bruno Schulz, Paul Celan, Edmond Jabès, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. Beyond these intellectual affinities, Petlin always remained attuned to the surrounding world, cultivating a “responsible aesthetic” that denounced war (in Algeria, Vietnam, Iraq, Syria), violence (both that of World War II camps—where the artist of Polish-Jewish origin lost part of his family—and that inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza), racial injustice, modern-day slavery, and more. In a 1964 text for the Galerie du Dragon, Édouard Glissant placed Petlin in the lineage of Goya and Géricault, among the “outraged commentators” of history.
His work is held in over 30 museums and in numerous private collections.
2014
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2018
7 September 2018
13 December 2017
