Studio Visit: Inside Peter Gronquist’s New Show (You Should See It)

Apr 06, 2024

ByMatthew TrueherzAugust 8, 2023

Peter Gronquist's art studio in the West Hills

Image: Matthew Trueherz

Outside the studio of artist Peter Gronquist in Portland’s West Hills sits a burned out car covered by a loose tarp, upturned skateboard ramps, a boulder on an industrial car jack, and four hefty stones hanging from chains on a carport-sized metal frame, which are dragged via remote control across a metal plate to “make line drawings,” Gronquist says. “It’s a drawing automaton based on the Missoula floods,” and the centerpiece of his show at Elizabeth Leach Gallery.

Which is to say that calling Gronquist a "multimedia artist" doesn't quite describe the situation.

Earlier in his career, Gronquist gained acclaim for a series of sculptures that “mocked American culture and consumerism”: taxidermied deer with gilded Gucci antlers; a gold-plated rocket launcher with “CHANEL” stamped across its barrel; an AK47 wrapped in Burberry check. At the time, this explicit social commentary was somewhat in line with the work of Tom Sachs and Charles Krafft, and produced by a guy in his late twenties living in New York City and Oakland digesting his surroundings.

He feels very distant from that work today, he says, sitting in a baroque, green velvet chair in his studio, a high-ceilinged pole barn roughly the size of a five-car garage. His current work is much more formally complex, and reflects the life of a 44-year-old guy who spends a lot of time in nature and reading up on the geological end of the Ice Age.

For a 2018 project titled “A Visual History of the Invisible,” Gronquist suspended a 50-by-50-foot sheet of silver spandex fabric above the Columbia River Gorge in Cascade Locks to capture the shape of the wind, because otherwise “you never see it,” he says. “You see what it’s done. You see erosion. You see it in mass, tragic events, like hurricanes or tornadoes; but, just everyday wind, you don’t see.” Capturing what we all know but can’t describe is the sentiment that has rippled through his work since, in his attempts at recording the imperceptible across mediums and subject matter.

His current show, Manifest, finds Gronquist dancing along the tension between refining craft with new materials and spontaneously manifesting elaborate ideas that “couldn’t possibly work, but somehow do.” The show includes the boulder line drawings and an automaton with which attendees are encouraged to “draw,” as well as what Gronquist calls “geological self-portraits.” These sculptural paintings resemble the earthy findings of archeological digs, and represent his own bones. The six large paintings were made by casting concrete—a hundred pounds each—inside traditional painter’s stretcher bars wrapped in a lace you might find in a bridal gown instead of canvas. From there Gronquist adds additional bone-like fragments cast in expanding urethane foam, and then begins painting.

A "geological self-portrait" by Peter Gronquist

Image: Matthew Trueherz

The series is autobiographical in that the works correspond to stages of his own life. “I was very feminine as a kid,” he says. Thus, the first few works more prominently feature lace, with small bits of concrete seeping through and hardening. As the series progresses, bones, some with tattoos—a miniature Wu Tang symbol, a rainbow, a spider web—akin to Gronquist’s own, appear. The concrete grows more prominent as well, “in some places completely destroying the lace,” he says.

Instead of catching the wind, in this series, he’s documenting the tension of aging, cataloging the self that we all hold in our head, in the form of literal concrete memories. “You know when a bone breaks, and it grows back together, and there’s this constant sort of healing over traumatic experiences?” He presses a thumb into a painted bone.

Another of Gronquist's "geological self-portraits"

Image: Matthew Trueherz

In the later pieces, the lace is gone. The largest work in this show (automaton notwithstanding) forgoes the rectangle of a “canvas” altogether. It’s roughly five feet square, and assembled from bones larger than any human’s, felted wool, and “bark” peeled from decades of flyers stapled to telephone poles (“little forgotten subculture histories”). It’s as organic, damaged, and healed-over as any human. “It’s like a life raft,” he says, “of just—you know—everything from my life.”