2018: 50 Works for 50 Years

Peter Reichardt

C.P.C. 4

Peter Reichardt is an artist and educator who makes work within the expanded field of drawing. Born in Texas, he received his BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in drawing in 2005 and his MFA from Washington State University in printmaking in 2007. He has exhibited his work across the United States and is a featured artist at Ipso Gallery, Fresh Produce, in Sioux Falls. He received an Austin Critics Table Award for his collaborative installation entitled Camp Base Camp and was featured in the national publication, New American Paintings. He is a Lecturer in the School of Design at South Dakota State University.

This drawing was included in imPULSE, a two-person exhibition of works by Reichardt and Andres Torres at the South Dakota Art Museum in 2017. Reichardt shared this artist statement at the time:

"My studio practice revolves around image-making: connecting play and discovery into focused (and sometimes intentionally unfocused) visual comments on the theme of pictorial conventions and collage through drawing. Subject matter within my body of work pulls fragments of our collected visual past from popular culture, cultural antiquities, sublime landscapes, to the banal everyday.

I face the challenge of constructing imagery that embodies the qualities of human experiences, emotions and perceptions by navigating the physical manipulation of preexisting imagery. Alterations to the source can be subtle or intentionally apparent and are used as a subversive act that allows me to expose the little white lies in the conventions of naturalism and depiction. Relationships are celebrated and exploited to create a fresh dialogue between different parts and its newly constructed whole. By altering the original and its operational nature, I produce an alternative answer to that challenge. Humor and overtones of something more serious might exist in that answer too."