No. 44, Barack Obama Painting

This portrait of Barack Obama is a unique, mixed media artwork incorporating appropriated street posters, printed images, pigment, acrylic and spray paint on stretched canvas, finished with a semi matte varnish. Peter Horvath exhibits in museums and galleries globally, and his work is included in permanent collections internationally, including the Nion McEvoy collection, and a new addition in 2016 to the Whitney Museum of American Art. He is the recipient of commissions from at The New Museum, NYC and New Radio and Performing Arts, Boston. Exhibitions include the Whitney Museum Of American Art‘s Artport (NYC), Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City), the Musée national des beaux-arts du  Québec  (Québec City, Canada) and FILE Electronic Language International Festival (São Paulo, Brazil). Merging street ephemera, movie posters, photographs, ink and spray paint, Horvath’s densely layered assemblage portraits 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 obscures his central characters with peeling, torn paper fragments and paint, frenetically surrounding a stilled subject. "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".