The Fountain Painting

Peter Hildebrand: Saatchi Online Critic's Choice by Ben Street http://magazine.saatchionline.com/online-top-10/critics-choice/peter-hildebrand-saatchi-online-critic%E2%80%99s-choice-by-ben-street Saatchi Online Weekly Top 10 http://magazine.saatchionline.com/online-top-10/saatchi-online-weekly-top-10-chosen-by-ben-street-feb-28-%E2%80%93-mar-6-2011 Born Detroit 1964.I moved to New York in 1991 and received my MFA from Hunter College in 1994. I have had two solo shows at Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg, and been included in numerous group shows in New York City and elsewhere in the U.S. I currently live and work in Red Hook, Brooklyn, with my wife and 8 year-old son. My body of work over the last few years involves a narrative that is centered around the American systems theorist and futurist Buckminster Fuller as symbolized by the geodesic dome as a an ideal structure. That ideal is one of American Utopianism and its relative failure, particularly since the the mid 20th century. Aspects of Modernism, the beatnik and hippie movements, punk rock and other musical forms of status quo rejection, all revolve around Fuller (and other visionaries such a Nikola Tesla, who died alone and in debt in the New Yorker Hotel, suffering from mental illness) as a metaphor for the collapse of American belief systems. The disturbed psychological states referenced in my paintings by images of hospitals and mental institutions such as Rockland from Allen Ginsburg's poem Howl (a landmark condemnation of American culture, government, and capitalism), as well as punk rock politics, extreme subcultures of heavy metal, and other forms of anarchic but idealistic, anti-conformist expression figure prominently in my work as I continue to expand the narrative of the United States as a complex and contradictory set of impulses.