Peter Sabat’s paintings adopt the cinematic shorthand of his LA environment. Everyday subject matter exists alongside representations of its underlying complexity, as if casting its shadow over the scene. Drawing on a personal history of the traveler and observer, director and performer, this practice does contain multitudes. Using expressive painterly techniques and a methodical approach, works merge contemporary and historical elements, facts with hallucinations, intimately on a human scale. The investigation of images confronts their power to reveal and obscure. In his parallel work as filmmaker, Sabat’s films return to the source of illumination, often using music and sound to narrate the images.

Many works were produced in series. Others, companion pieces to film projects: California Elegies and Red Herrings (And Salt Cod), both currently in post-production. The COVID-19 pandemic looms over recent works, directly or obliquely. Similarly, the umbrella of mass surveillance, which inspired drawings from satellite imagery. And, Erich von Stroheim’s incomplete epic silent film Greed (1924) and author John McPhee’s writings on geology in The New Yorker and Assembling California (1994), inspired another body of work. It describes the ecstasies and tragedies of human presence in the natural environment, from the 19th century California Gold Rush to the 2018 Camp Fire, which destroyed the town of Paradise, where the artist lived for several years.

Peter Sabat is a Canadian-U.S. artist who has exhibited his paintings and film projects in Canada, the United States and Europe. Born in Kitchener, Canada, Sabat received his BFA from Toronto’s OCAD University where he studied painting and media arts. Between 1997-2004, Sabat resided in Berlin, Germany, where he began collaborations with composers on films, operas, and art projects, including Walter Zimmermann, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Marc Sabat and Thomas Meadowcroft. His works have been shown at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, KNM Berlin’s HouseMusik, the MaerzMusik festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Goethe-Institut, and at Carnegie Hall as part of the Berlin in Lights festival in New York. He is currently working on several painting and film projects, including a celebration of the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami. After residing in Newfoundland, Canada and in Northern California, he’s now based in Los Angeles.