Peter Shelton
PETER SHELTON
Born in 1951 in Troy, Ohio, sculptor Peter Shelton has dedicated his artistic career to corporeal and spatial explorations of both architecture and the human form. Through a diverse utilization of materials such as bronze, cement, iron, and fiberglass, Shelton’s work spans from sculpture to structure, and is often personified by imbuing his art with qualities that reference flesh or body shape. Yet it is this very astute manipulation of medium that provokes one to question how such configurations like the bulbousness of a piece may leave a biological impression. From his pre-med background to mechanical roots, Shelton continuously brings a fresh eye to sculpture and pushes the boundary of interaction between object, subject, building, and anatomy.
Based in Los Angeles since 1969, Shelton received his B.A. in 1973 from California’s Pomona College, after a multiplicity of majors that ranged from anthropology to theater. A keen interest since childhood in the constructions of both people and manmade formations was fueled by multiple family members. Shelton’s grandfather was a doctor and his paternal grandmother’s family were Studebakers, who had centuries’ old experience in blacksmithing and eventually transitioned to the automotive industry. Mechanics in myriad expressions have been a guiding force for Shelton and contemporaneously aid in defining his art. Returning to his hometown for a certification at the Hobart School of Welding Technology in 1974, Shelton resumed practice in California after gaining more manual experience, acquiring his first studio that same year located in Santa Monica. He obtained an M.F.A. at the University of California Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) during 1979, explaining, “...[graduate school was] less for the critical circumstance than just making art, making sculpture necessitated space and equipment which I couldn't really acquire and use. So that was a really useful period where I really was very busy.”
Experiencing the wide open spaces of California and free from constraints that previously-established movements on the East Coast may have perpetuated, Shelton found inspiration in global art like that of India and larger South Asia, with their “...idea[s] of consciousness residing in more parts of the body than just your brain.” This philosophy can certainly be observed in Shelton’s art, which toys with orifices and appendages, emotion and preconceptions of shape, as well as the contemplation of macro versus micro.
With a vast body of work both in scale and quantity, Shelton’s career of over fifty years has been extensively recognized on an international level. Solo show highlights include Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Houston, Texas; Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, Halifax, England; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York. Select group exhibitions are 1955 – 1985 at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; After Cézanne at Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Frieze Viewing Room IRL at L.A. Louver, Venice, California; From Wendt to Thiebaud at Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, California; La Percezione del Futuro, at Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria, Perugia, Italy; and Monocromos: de Malevich al presente at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain. Shelton has received numerous awards and honors worldwide, and he is featured in many collections of the aforementioned museums, in addition to institutions such as J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, Poland; Panza Foundation, Milan, Italy; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, District of Columbia.
“... it took a long time to figure out, actually how to think about making things that had very specific kinds of references to the body, but still without it necessarily being purely representational...it’s more like it refers to and gives you this kind of somatic quality of the body without necessarily having to think about what it referred to or where it came from.”
“I went through a period where you’ve seen some of the work...and there’s quite a bit of movement to them, and they’re twisting and turning...sometimes hiding from you the thing that’s the most significant sort of turned away from you. The thing that’s most important is looking that way, and you have to be sort of forced to go around the side of it. But then also there’s this kind of wobble in the work itself, which I like the idea that it could kind of put that wobble into your own physiognomy so that you could have that kind of— it would play itself out again as much in your body as this in your eye.”
“...I’ll just be walking along the street, and I’m like, ‘Oh.’ So I don’t even know what or where that comes from, but something comes to me like that. And I will just make a simple notation in a notebook. And I’ve learned over time that drawing in that way, even though I don’t know what’s going on when I first made note or draw that later, it kind of comes to me more— it may be over years where I start to sort of see, ‘Oh, I see. That’s what that is.’”
