Cleon Peterson valuation
Black, white and red scenes of power and violence, drawn flat like a frieze.
Cleon Peterson was born in Seattle in 1973 and works from Los Angeles, and the work is unmistakable and unvarying in its subject: figures beating, dominating and overpowering one another, rendered flat in a restricted palette of black, white and red, and composed like classical friezes or vase painting.
What a work by Cleon Peterson is worth
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Bio
Cleon Peterson was born in Seattle in 1973 and works from Los Angeles, and the work is unmistakable and unvarying in its subject: figures beating, dominating and overpowering one another, rendered flat in a restricted palette of black, white and red, and composed like classical friezes or vase painting. The consistency is the point — it reads as a single ongoing statement about power rather than as a series of pictures.
Unique acrylics on canvas lead, with a large and active market in screenprint editions below them. Because the palette and composition are so consistent, editions from different years and publishers can look similar at a glance, so the edition marking, publisher and signature are what identify a sheet. Several releases have sold out immediately and trade actively, and condition on flat black areas is unforgiving: scuffs, handling marks and fading all show more than they would on a varied surface.
Studio Number One, Paris and Shadow of Men
After a troubled youth, Peterson took a BFA at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena in 2004 and an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006, and worked in graphic design and illustration, including at Shepard Fairey's agency, Studio Number One. In 2016 he painted Endless Sleep beneath the Eiffel Tower for Nuit Blanche in Paris, and he took part in Lasco Project #8 at the Palais de Tokyo.
In 2018 the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver gave him Shadow of Men, a solo show of murals, paintings and sculpture, and Blood & Soil in Los Angeles that year included bronze sculptures and one large-scale piece. Mr. Sinister followed at albertz benda in New York in 2022, and Under the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, twenty-seven new paintings, at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo in 2023. The bronzes are a much smaller category than the paintings and the editions, and the gallery's documentation should stay with them.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
