Peter Drake - Artist Biography

Peter Drake’s work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions throughout the US and Europe and his works are included in the collections of The Whitney Museum, The Phoenix Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art, L.A., The Achenbach Collection and the L.A. County Art Museum among others.

Drake was awarded a 2006 fellowship in painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts, is a prior recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and was chosen to be the year long Artist in Residence at the “Kunst Station Sankt Peter” in Cologne, Germany.

During 2005-2006, individual paintings were exhibited in the Mobile Museum of Art, ASU Art Museum and the Katonah Museum of Art. Articles and reviews of Drake’s work have appeared in Art in America, Art New England, Flash Art, Interview Magazine and The New York Times. His work was highlighted in the May ‘07 issue of Arts & Antiques Magazine in an article entitled “Back to the Burbs” written by Edward Gomez.

American art critic Donald Kuspit writes: “What makes Drake’s paintings convincing--expressively powerful rather than simply illustrationally efficient--is their abstract beauty. They are formally exquisite, and their formal underpinning erupts through their imagery: they instantly read as abstractions, the former gestural, the latter geometrical.”

Peter Drake emerged in the 80’s art world with large drawings made by scratching thru blackened ink surfaces, then became known for his haunting reduced palette dream imagery and now he is exploring the enigmatic aspects of popular culture. His work has been described as subtly surrealistic in content as the viewer knows something is amiss and yet is unsure of what that something is.

Peter Drake lives and works in New York.