Peter Dellert
Spontaneous Abstractions
2014 - 2025
18 (Tue) - 30 (Sun) November, 2025
11:00 -18:00, Monday closed
Peter Dellert created this series of paintings with colored pencil and pen as expressions of his surroundings, feelings, and inspirations, drawn and painted as a visual record. These works are often produced far from home, during his travels, frequently in rural or natural environments. Their influences include rivers, lakes, oceans, beaches, mountains, skies both day and night, and the many plants, insects, and animals he encounters in the world around him.
The works are often composed while Dellert listens to music, jazz both new and old, without lyrics, and sometimes the same CD replayed continuously. He frequently returns to familiar sites such as Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Digby Neck, Nova Scotia, the beaches of St. Croix, and places such as Arashiyama and Naoshima in Japan. These places provide him with a visual vocabulary from which he draws references for his paintings. Although Dellert does not consider himself a landscape painter, these small works often reflect and interpret the landscape, seascape, or moonscape surrounding him at any given time.
In this way, the series functions as part travel log, part journal, part documentary, and part improvisation.
Dellert’s influences are perhaps apparent, yet they have evolved and solidified through years of museum visits, careful study of monographs, and close looking. Among the artists who have shaped his visual thinking are Kandinsky, Klee, Miró, Malevich, Gorky, Diebenkorn, Arp, Frankenthaler, Eva Hesse, Julie Mehretu, and many others, both painters and sculptors.
Each work begins on used 320-grit sandpaper, once employed as the final abrasive in Dellert’s earlier furniture-making practice. At that time, he painted surfaces in multiple layers of color over textured wood, then scuffed them back to reveal underlying tones. He first exhibited these sandpaper pieces as ready-mades but soon began developing the original lines and textures with additions of his own colored pencils and inks. Over time, his approach grew bolder, incorporating layered patterns, designs, and color on top of the surface’s inherent texture.
Every composition begins with the selection of the right substrate, the particular piece of sandpaper that will serve as the canvas. The choice influences the final outcome and is guided by Dellert’s mood and intentions at that moment. Each painting becomes a visual snapshot of a day, a time, and a place as he experiences it. Taken together, the series forms an ongoing artistic journal of his travels and observations.
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Peter Dellert
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The artist’s practice engages with the visible and concealed information embedded in the forms and materials of the natural world. His work often explores the dialogue between what is inherent in matter and what is revealed through artistic intervention. Traditionally working with sculptural forms derived from recognizable biomorphic shapes, enlarged, altered, or distilled into minimal expressions, he investigates how familiar structures can hold hidden narratives. Though the forms may appear approachable, their details, seams, edges, openings, and surfaces suggest layers of meaning not immediately apparent, prompting viewers to look closer and question each piece’s origin, intent, and purpose.
At the current exhibition, the artist extends this exploration to a new medium: drawings made on used sandpaper. These works use the natural texture, imperfections, and traces of wear as an active surface. Responding to the material’s existing marks, the artist adds his own lines to capture the atmosphere of a moment or place. In this way, each piece becomes a record of encounter, a collaboration between the found material and the artist’s gesture. The sandpaper and pencil act as equal partners, both shaping the work and contributing to its meaning.
Through this process, he creates flat objects that retain the depth and tension present in his sculptural practice. The balance between control and surrender, revelation and concealment, remains central. Each work speaks to the vitality of materials and to the shared agency between matter and maker, evoking an unspoken but persistent reflection on the human condition.