Peter Dmytro Wowkowych Contemporary Artist
March 2018
“Mythopoetic” at Coagula Curatorial, Los Angeles, CA
https://www.artsy.net/show/coagula-curatorial-mythopoetic
As part of Coagula Curatorial’s “New Curator Series”, Peter Wowkowych will curate a group show with Coagula’s gallery owner, Mat Gleason. “Mythopoeic” will open March 3, 2018.
The six artists invited to participate in “Mythopoetic” include Nick Brown, Kim Kei, Chase Langford, Mike Chearney, Stephanie Pryor and Peter Wowkowych. These artists explore a painterly world of fictional, artificial or subliminal mythology. Each artist explores themes of universal myth making through the use of a consciously material, physically rich, painting process.
Peter’s short history as a curator began 30 years ago in Italy. In 1988, as an intern at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice, he was invited by Fred Licht, trustee and chief Curator of the Collezione Peggy Guggenheim, to assist with the curation and installation of the exhibition “Arte Italiana del Dopoguerra dai Musei Guggenheim” (Postwar Italian Art from the Guggenheim Museum). The show was installed in the 16th century Palazzo del Te, Mantua, Italy, designed by mannerist architect Giuliano Romano. Artists in the show included Burri, Chia, Pisani, Vedova, Tancredi, Pomodorro, Fontana, and other representatives from various post WWII Italian-global art movements.
July 2017
Day Jobs: Peter Wowkowych, Architect
A week long series about artists who work day jobs outside of the art world. By Dani Dodge.
https://artandcakela.com/2017/07/31/day-jobs-peter-wowkowych-architect/
May 2016
Review of "Slouching Toward Los Angeles" Encausrics series, by Mat Gleason, Founder of Coagula Art Journal.
“When Peter Wowkowych calls his series ‘Slouching Toward Los Angeles’ it is with full knowledge that all of popular and serious culture slouch this way already these days.
“The topography of L.A. varies wildly all while maintaining a temperate clime. These pictures echo that diverse, sedate smolder. Poised yet rugged, organized yet free of compositional tropes, all over yet harmonious, the paradoxes of Los Angeles pulsate in these landscapes reminiscent in their consistency of Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series without any direct riffing.
“The genius here is the thick encaustic that substitutes for L.A.’s omnipresent marine layer. While the haze carries nearby ocean air inland for a breezy, cooling effect it also hosts exhaust particles which become smog, an inescapable poison in paradise. Likewise the thick encaustic here forces the bright and pretty passages into a submissive hue, harmonizing the picture into a meditation on the whole instead of an attempt at the plastic idealized perfection most attempts at capturing L.A.’s essence slouch toward.”
- Mat Gleason, Founder of Coagula Art Journal, internationally recognized art critic and curator of contemporary art
April 2016
“Slouching Toward Los Angeles,” a one person show at the American Institute of Architects , Los Angeles, CA
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/peter-wowkowychs-painting-show-slouching-toward-los-opens-wowkowych
Peter Wowkowych, AIA had his first solo show “Slouching Toward Los Angeles,” in the historic Wiltern Building offices of the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles. April and May, 2016. It nearly sold out on its opening night. April 14, 2016.
"Slouching Toward Los Angeles" an exhibit of 11 new paintings and encaustics by Peter Wowkowych, AIA.
The work in this exhibition explores serendipitous psychological, environmental, and political cartographic space making of an a-spacial Los Angeles and Southern California, a Californian re-interpretation of the renaissance Roman Nolli plan. Peter recently returned from Rome, as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, where the sensibility of Roman space making, collided with his 25 years of living in Los Angeles, creating the inspiration for this body of work.
Exploring the boundaries between people, places, cultures and ideas of global citizenship, Peter's art work grapples with the human condition, our experiences in and out of our bodies, and how places shape who we become.
Peter Wowkowych, AIA is an architect with Sony Pictures Entertainment and a painter. He is on the Board of Directors for Restoration Works International (RWI) where his team recently completed the 10 year restoration of a 300 year old Tibetan Buddhist monastery high in the Nepali Himalayas. In April he is headed to Cuba for the AIA Committee on Design Conference to look for RWI's next project to restore.
Peter holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame and a Master of Architecture degree from Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).