PEGGY CYPHERS

To me, painting is a way to express the magnificence of this amazingly beautiful world, and to celebrate the mystery of communications with animals. Paint’s luscious colors and forms express through physical gesture the languages of non-human beings.

– Peggy Cyphers

“Now she’s just painting, in an effortless style that corrupts and complicates the staining technique originated by Color Field painters like Helen Frankenthaler with various ideas in the air: notational, pattern-prone motifs, landscape references and allusions to textiles and fabric. The plants are still here, but now they are usually soft blooms and plumes of color that also suggest, with a little help from the titles, wet pavement, blurry stop lights or even the Brooklyn Bridge.”

– Roberta Smith, New York Times

“Like Paul Klee, Cyphers employs simple elements to form elegant compositions; like Joan Mitchell, she tends to work her canvases in a dense, layered manner guided by an instinct for balancing form and color. But her understated, vaguely representational visual lexicon is completely of her own invention.”

– Sarah Valdez, Art in America

“Yet despite such appearances, the light of her paintings is almost as varied, and quite a bit fuller. In fact, what makes her paintings convincing is not so much their imagery, which is familiar enough from the work of artists like Terry Winters, but their expansive luminosity and their sure, subtle way with composition. Ms. Cyphers’s apparently loose and free-floating forms never add up to compositional negligence or disorder. Instead, there is a subtle underlying classicism at work, keeping each thing placed and centered.”

– Barry Schwabsky, New York Times