Peter Horvath

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Blue Chip Artist

Peter Horvath's work is in the Whitney Museum's permanent collection as well as the Nion McEvoy collection.

Peter draws much of his imagery from mid 20th century advertising material.

In his early collages, Peter created audio narratives to assist his work.

Peter Horvath is a Canadian artist who creates vibrant and expressive photography-based mixed media work. Driven by the desire to deconstruct and recontextualise, Peter embraces digital and analogue techniques to create art that reinvents narrative and redefines meaning. Peter’s approach is colourful and dynamic, and through the use of juxtaposition, he exposes the beauty in chaos. With a focus on materials such as vintage American advertising materials and pop culture iconography, Peter explores the surreal, the nostalgic and the hypnagogic.

Peter Horvath’s Style

Merging street ephemera, movie posters, photographs, ink, acrylic and spray paint, Horvath’s newest series "Heroes" are densely layered assemblage portraits that reflect on his fascination with media consumption, cultural icons and urban decay, sharing an affinity with the Décollage of the 1960’s Nouveau Réalistes Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villeglé. Horvath writes "When I began making these works I considered how we have become a society obsessed with aging, clinging to, and in pursuit of our emblems of youth. The images of the people I choose for these portraits have a strength and vitality - I place them among the wreckage of crumbling, entropic elements - suggesting nothing lasts forever".

Exhibitions

Peter Horvath's work is included in numerous permanent and private collections internationally, including the Nion McEvoy collection, the Art Gallery of Hamilton’s permanent collection, and in 2016 an addition to the Whitney Museum of American Art. His art has invited global commissions from The New Museum in New York, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Quebec in Canada.

Peter exhibits his art worldwide and in 2018 he took part in the group exhibition Adoptive in the Stephen Bulger Gallery. The show saw a selection of Peter’s large scale pieces that epitomised the artist’s style. Fragments of famous faces layered with typography all sitting on an ambiguous background adorned the walls of the gallery and made for a series of animated portraits with a clear sense of narrative instilled in them.

Read our article peeling back contemporary collage with Peter Horvath.