Artist Roland Petersen at the Elverhøj Museum

A coup for the Elverhøj Museum is its upcoming major exhibit of works by 98 years young artist Roland Petersen [b.1926, Denmark]. The exhibit, titled The Visual Feast, is on view from October 26 through January 5. The critically-lauded Petersen has been painting for five decades, and continues to create, producing art in his Bay area studio while thriving at home with his wife.

Though he is a longstanding member of the Bay Area Figurative Movement whose members pointedly pivoted from abstract expressionism to figuration, his works notably divide and conquer the realms of geometricism, Petersen’s color blocking landscapes often embracing a certain figurative abstraction. No short CV here, Petersen’s works are in the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, private collections, and government buildings. Petersen was one of the first professors in the early art department at the University of California at Davis, where he shepherded the program for over thirty years, recruiting artists Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri, and Robert Arneson to the faculty in that time. A recipient of Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, he holds a BA and MA from UC Berkeley, and studied at the Hans Hoffman School of Fine Arts in Provincetown. 

411: www.elverhoj.org