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 contemporary Canadian artist who creates mixed-media digital collages. His dreamlike worlds build on cyberpunk - a subgenre of science fiction whose references to pop culture are contrasted by decadent, apocalyptic imagery. These layered compositions are driven by the desire to deconstruct and recontextualise. Peter Horvath embraces digital collage, photography, painting and analogue techniques to create art that reinvents photomontage and redefines digital mixed media.

Through the use of juxtaposition and matte pigment, Horvath exposes the beauty in chaos. The mixed-media artist merges street ephemera, movie posters, photography, ink, acrylic, and spray paint with an approach emblematic of 1960s Nouveau Réalisme.

PETER HORVATH’S ART

Assembling vintage American advertising materials, pop culture imagery and celebrity iconography, the contemporary artist explores the surreal, the nostalgic, the new and the hypnagogic. Horvath’s latest series, Heroes, are densely layered portraits that reflect on his fascination with media consumption, cultural icons and urban decay.

Horvath writes, “When I began making these works, I considered how we have become a society obsessed with ageing, 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”.

ARTIST EXHIBITIONS

Peter Horvath’s work is included in numerous permanent and private contemporary 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 portrait 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.

In 2018, Horvath participated in the group exhibition Adoptive in the Stephen Bulger Gallery. The show saw a selection of Peter’s large-scale mixed-media work in his signature narratorial style; fragments of famous faces layered with typography adorned the gallery’s walls.

Read our article peeling back contemporary collage with Peter Horvath.