WHITEHOT MAGAZINE: Peggy Cyphers at the Front Room Gallery (Hudson, New York)
The painter Peggy Cyphers has had some thirty solo shows in New York and internationally; her current exhibition takes place in Hudson, an art-oriented town two hours north of New York (the poet and art critic John Ashbery lived there). Cyphers, a Professor at Pratt Institute, creates works that pull together influences as diverse as Chinese calligraphy and landscape art, indigenous peoplesâ formal and thematic practices (likely most evident in the artistâs orientation toward nature), and the established, often emotional language of the New York School.
NEW YORK TIMES: Three Painters Add a Human Touch to Abstraction
Peggy Cyphers’s paintings also incorporate multiplicity and layering, but rather than looking to the gestural vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism for her models, Ms. Cyphers works in the tradition of biomorphic abstraction — that is, the abstract use of forms derived from nature. A lot of the forms in these paintings recall childish versions of flowers, buds and tendrils, although the associations can also be harder to pin down. Ms. Cyphers also works some recognizable representations into the weave of her abstractions, in the form of repeated, faintly silk-screened images like moths, owls and faces.
SIMPL-MAG: An Interview with Peggy Cyphers
Peggy Cyphers (b.1954) is a painter, who focused on the series called Modern Fossils that attempts to explore the consciousness, geological time and the Anthropocene that fossilize the moment and appropriate the images from nature and cultural history. Now, with her own development of her artistic career, she taught fine arts field as an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute since 1989. For todayâs editorial interview, we will discuss her works and her opinion toward contemporary art.
BROOKLYN RAIL: Peggy Cyphers “Animal Spirits”
Posed halfway between abstract patterning and geological reference, âSilver Spiritâ reminds us that painting is still capable of capturing our interest, despite the funerary orations that the medium is dead. Cyphers makes it clear that she has opted for a double awareness, in which non-objective insight vies with close scrutiny of the natural world.
CROSS CONTEMPORARY ART: Modern Fossils
Peggy Cyphers responds to the multi-dimensional experience of Being through painterly gesture and luminous layers of pigments. Cyphers creates the sensation of gazing upwards through indeterminate, glowing layers defying both perspective and gravity. In this latest body of work, Peggy Cyphers’ gestural brushwork is evident not only on canvas but watercolor and monotypes on paper reflecting her overarching aesthetic concern of the interconnectedness of all beings to the earth and to each other.
ART IN AMERICA: Peggy Cyphers
These airy abstractions, most in a quatrefoil format with textural flourishes of sand and gold leaf, seem inspired in equal measure by natural phenomena and ancient Chinese painting.
BLEEDING COOL: “Places and Things” at Dorian Grey Gallery
Peggy Cyphers’ paintings transport the viewer into distant imagined landscapes where abstraction slips into narrative and the familiar and the wild co-exist impossibly.
ROLL MAGAZINE: Samhain Art Holiday Madness
Her paintings are made by constantly turning the canvas, giving the work a strange vertiginous effect of not being exactly sure where we are: are we catching a woodpeckerâs feather out of the corner of our human eye, or are we a mite deep inside the birdâs plumage peering out?
ART SPIEL: Peggy Cyphers: Passages at the Front Room
Peggy Cyphersâ exhibition at The Front Room Gallery in Hudson, titled Passages, integrates disparate painting traditions into abstract landscapes. The techniqueâfluid brush strokes combined with sand and paint pourâdraws from Chinese landscape art, Native American traditions, and Postwar Abstraction. These paintings suggest the natural worldâs fragility, mystery, and grandeur, recalling the upward gaze from the base of a canyon.
TIMES UNION: Spring art exhibitions in the Hudson Valley
The accomplished painter and printmaker Peggy Cyphers pulls from a mixed bag of art-historical references, from American color field painting to Navajo sand paintings, to conceive her vivacious abstractions. In âPassages,â a solo show at Front Room Gallery, Cyphers will share a group of mixed-media paintings from her ongoing âAnimal Spiritsâ series. She creates these works by layering acrylic paint, sand and leafing on canvas, imbuing the picture plane with variations in texture, luminosity and chromatic vibrancy.
YALE UNIVERSITY: Museum of Nonvisible Art; Interview with Peggy Cyphers
She scavenges from Chinese Landscape Painting, Indian Sand Painting, Process Art and Surrealism to create her highly original hybrids which critique dominant cultureâs over-Ââconsumption of the environment. The recent paintings titled âAnimal Spiritsâ employ pattern and translucency to develop spatial compositions that at once defy gravity and orientation. They challenge perceptual orientations to envision spaces of expansive consciousness, while relying on direct encounter with water, birds and other animals for visual cues of color, pattern and gravitational freedom.
NEW YORK TIMES: ART: Primal Nature and the Celebrating of a ‘Joyful Spirit’
At the Frankel Nathanson Gallery in Maplewood, Peggy Cyphers shows that she is at home in primal nature. But she also acknowledges the clangorous contemporary world.
NEW YORK TIMES: Art in Review; 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.
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Peggy Cyphersâs Iowa Prairie Conversation pays homage to the many now-extinct plant species that once thrived on the American Prairie but have disappeared due to agricultural farming. Her cyanotypes feature images of centuries-old extinct plants she unearthed from the archives at the Grinnell College herbarium. By incorporating those plant images, she connects the meticulous cataloguing of 19th-century naturalists with her own artwork and the work of naturalists today.
BURNAWAY: Shows at Barbara Archer and Sandler Hudson Tackle Eco-Abuse
In most of Peggy Cyphers’ new two-panel paintings, an animated spiral and an equally animated Chevron shape, both more organic than geometric, cavort in an ambiguous, semi-abstract landscape. Their antics, painted in oil on canvas, are recapitulated below on smaller pradella-like panels made of rough white-sprayed tarpaper. The contrast between these two surfaces and the scenes they depict – one creamy and in focus, the other rough and out-of-focus, one suggesting a vital, breathing ”real” world, the other its subterranean fossilized remains – is the focal point of the work.
ARTNET: David Ebony’s Top Ten; Peggy Cyphers at Donahue/Sosinski
Peggy Cyphers has a persistent vision of nature that she translates into richly colored and textured quasi-abstract paintings. She pours and lightly brushes countless layers of paint and sand onto the canvas until she achieves luminous and sumptuous surface. Approaching each canvas as a kind of garden where organic and geometric elements intermingle with intense light, she nurtures elaborate hybrid forms.