May 17th, 2026, Peter Brock
Peter Brock, Anthropic, 24th April - 30th May 2026, anonymous gallery, New York. Exhibition view. Photo by New Document.Diego Diez: We have been seeing so many things this week, and I always have this fixation that you are so concerned with the surface. So let's start there. We were at the Vija Celmins show at Matthew Marks, and there we bumped into her and talked about the lithographs and etchings. Do you think we can start with her to discuss a bit more about what we have seen and your practice as a whole?
Peter Brock: Vija paints things that are graphically very simple and straightforward, a starry sky, contrast, really not a lot of spatial complexity in the traditional sense. It's all in the micro-tonality of the surface, the way that complexity is built up through many soft, sensitive marks that add to an overall field of activity. If you imagine her work without that constant change in the quality of the touch, each time she touches the surface, whether the etching plate or the canvas, there's a slightly different feeling. So you get a starry sky, something graphically straightforward, almost simplistic as a subject, but I find them extremely captivating because of how alive and varied the surface is. It's a good way to point out that without a compelling surface, an image has no chance.
Vija Celmins Untitled (Ocean), 1977 Graphite on acrylic ground and paper 25.4 x 32.8 cm (10 × 12 7/8 in.) Collection SFMOMA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bequest of Alfred M. Esberg. © Vija Celmins
Diego: You say an image has no chance without a compelling surface. But many images have become memetic, covers of newspapers, lodged in our brain. The news on our phone. Those have no surface, in a sense.
Peter: Yes you’re right to point that out. But that immediate recognition is not the only—or even the most interesting—form of visual experience when it comes to painting. If you want a sustained visual encounter, you need a sophisticated surface. You can't separate that from the medium in which you encounter it. On your phone, you're confronting backlit pixels glowing through glossy glass, which saturates everything, adds contrast. You could point to Warhol or Johns, who relied on the recognisability and cultural cachet of an image:the flag, a celebrity. But there the conversation regarding surface is in relation to the circulation involved. Warhol's cheapening is the point, the flaws of the silkscreen, the uneven registration in dialogue with the recognisability of the subject. My fixation comes from a different place. Painting is not in conversation only with other paintings. It's in conversation with all planar media, all two-dimensional imagery we see today. We are confronted by very sophisticated technological surfaces capable of delivering saturated, detailed, glowing images, in magnificent containers with rounded metal edges and shimmering corners. I conceive of a painting in dialogue with that. For you to care about an image, to stand in front of it as a body, there has to be depth available. If the image is articulated in the same manner in every inch, you've lost a layer of depth. But if things shift, the thickness or thinness of the paint, the gloss or the matte, the size of the marks, the grit in the surface, that provides an essential dynamic.
Diego: And it has to do with the body.
Peter: As we stand in front of a painting we're not actually still. We shift our weight from one hip to another, we step back and forward, we lean our heads. If a picture has a developed surface, different things unfold as you shift your perspective. That connects to something I loved in Monika Baer's show I saw a few months ago. Standing ten feet away or two feet away gave you completely different feelings about the painting. There were symbols, little drawings, words, only legible if you were a foot or two away. From anything farther her paintings just look like brick walls. That's brilliant, because the detail only reveals itself to a curious viewer, someone who actually comes close. In my own work I'm consciously creating a level of nuance only available to someone who stands in front of it for more than a few seconds. The impression up close is different from the impression at a distance. That maps onto many complicated aesthetic experiences. People appear different at a distance than they do up close. A short encounter leads you to think one thing, while spending two days with someone leads you to see them very differently. Painting that does not change with your physical proximity is missing something important about an embodied art experience. So I'm willing to sacrifice some graphic legibility for this type of nuance. Some work broadcasts its details loudly. I'm willing to have quieter work that risks being overlooked, because the rewards of noticing something slowly are worth it. Especially now, when everyone's in a hurry, constantly ranking and rating in this accelerated way the internet feeds.
Monika Baer Schweine Steine Scherben, 7th November 2025 - 24th January 2026 Greene Naftali, New York. Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York. Photo: Júlia Standovár
Diego: That connects to the Mehretu show at Marian Goodman. I actually enjoyed walking around them, in a way that's maybe gimmicky, because they shift colour as you move. I joked with Lucía, you cannot document this, how do you tell someone a painting with hints of green turns into one with hints of purple. But you didn't really like them.
Peter: I've never encountered a body of work with so much technical sophistication and so little life. The technique gave me almost no pleasure. It felt hopelessly mechanical to me. I saw technique, pigment, graphic sophistication, contrast, all the raw ingredients of an art experience, but to me it's a pile of techniques on a canvas. I felt nothing. Part of the reason is the work seemed obsessed with demonstrating its sophistication. It's a little how I feel about Laura Owens at times, who is obviously an incredibly intelligent, accomplished painter, but is capable of letting her ambition towards sophistication crowd out the interesting part of her work. Mehretu maybe shares that, with all the means available to develop the work, the size, the money, the assistance, the masking. To me it's a clear example of diminishing returns. In Venice two years ago, the early work was what I could most get behind, because there were little errors, funny things where her technique faltered, a bit more breathing space. Even then it's an architectural diagram through a blender. Laura Owens at least keeps a sense of humour. I found no humour in the Mehretu work, which is maybe a problem too. Talk about suffocating. What I see first is the sheer amount of labour. Work I like generally feels effortless, like an exhalation, an ease to look at. When you confront a painting and the first thing you think about is technique, that's a sign it's not very good. Since Duchamp, technique is not a primary value, and by any construction technique is not enough. It's not interesting in itself.
Diego: In the past we saw a lot of drawings in your studio too, but when it comes to the paintings you've said you have no interest in canvas. And surface itself can carry a negative connotation, people think of it as thin, as vanity. How do you hold those two things, the material you choose and what surface actually means to you?
Peter: For me a more sophisticated understanding is that the surface is the voice of the text. It is what is said, and how it is said. The affect, the tone on top of the language. I'd go further. The relationship between surface and image is almost closer than voice and language. It's inseparable. It gives the image its body in the world. One of the biggest casualties of this Instagram painting era is the separation of image from surface. People learn the text with no interest in how to voice it. That's also why I refuse to separate the way something happens from what it is. The material in which something is articulated changes what that thing is. The same gesture in a different surface— in a different material—is a completely different work. I've constructed these specific surfaces because they allow things not possible otherwise. Canvas is totally unfeeling to me. Wood panels could be interesting at some point, plywood, straight up plywood panels. I could see that happening.
Peter Brock, Anthropic (01), 2026 Oil and aqua resin on aluminum, 100.3 x 121.9 cm (39.5 x 48 in). Photo by New Document.
Diego: Let's go to your own show, because here I want to be honest with you. I feel I learned so much about painting not only talking with you but looking at your paintings. You just described the marks shifting in every inch. And I felt some of these new paintings are a bit asphyxiated. The one upstairs I really enjoyed, because it has those qualities I always loved in you, that fresco quality from another era, the magic touch where you wonder how it's even done, the little circles from the sanding, the hand, the machining. And then in some of the new ones, the big blocks of colour asphyxiate that a bit. How do you feel about that?
Peter: The way to keep your work moving is to look for different pathways towards the same feeling that motivates you. Artists have a few central motivations, and successful practices develop different means of approach to that same interest. The textured plaster surface you're talking about is something I'm very comfortable with at this point, and no longer as interesting in a direct way. So in this body of work I was consciously trying to reach the same destination from a different approach. Instead of textural shifts and subtle colour tones in the plaster, the work depends on very thin layers of powerful colour interacting, opposite colours layering over each other. If you look closely there are still many aspects of the plaster and the grain coming through. You just have to get closer. In the other work I heighten that contrast to bring it out, almost like wood grain. In these, you're right that it's covered. But, in being covered the voice of the plaster still asserts itself in a subtler way. It's like I have a dial to adjust where in the surface that complexity happens. Here it's submerged in colour, but it's there. Small colour shifts work on the brain differently than high-contrast textural shifts, and that's a dynamic I wanted to address.
Diego: When we talked again later, I told you I felt the colour was hiding something I read as a core part of your work, and that I didn't see it beneath the surface.
Peter: I think you missed something, because underneath the colour there's so much activity. You just have to give it a second. You seemed a little impatient in there, or distracted maybe. That's my view. I accept your right to be interested in certain parts of the work more than others. But what I ask of you is to be a patient viewer. First, give the work time. Second, see the bigger picture.
Diego: Fair. And looking back at all the work of yours I've seen in person, I can point to what I really love. That one in the first group show we did together, the one sold to Seb. I enjoyed it so much. It felt like the painting was constantly a ghost of itself, this double division, like a double painting.
Peter Brock The Limited Sphere, 2021 Oil and graphite on aqua-resin on aluminum panel, 60.1 x 76.2 cm (23 5/8 x 30 in)
Peter: It's funny, because that one in a lot of ways is a precursor to this work. The dark top, the two planes. That's very much the archetype.
But I think it’s definitely about how I want to structure my time: what I want to do on a certain day, you know. And then to bring them together into a show is kind of… I don’t know—something really new happens to it. It’s really amazing, because they make relationships with each other too. And I really hope that it’s interesting for a viewer to try and… untie this, or tap into it.
Diego: So there is no straight line.
Peter: I don't believe in straight paths for artists. I'm always in a spiral, everything comes back, everything turns in. If this is the territory of painting, I go over here, and over here, and what I'm doing is learning. For the next show I'll take some of that learning and try to integrate it into my existing material language. This show is about embracing an intense colour field in relation to the textured, geologic surface I've been developing for fifteen years—he one you've responded to. I'm comfortable with that surface. The show is about exploring it in relation to chromatic auras, strong colour. From this I learn a lot about how the texture and colour happen. I take some of that, bring it over here, try another gesture, and that gesture comes back in. That's how, through a spiral over decades, you build an ambitious painting practice. The thing about art is that it's both less than us and more than us. I'm not reducible to any one of my paintings, but together all my paintings are way more than me.