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The Visual Feast of Roland Petersen Debuts Oct 26 at Elverhøj Museum
WHO: Elverhøj Museum of History and Art
What: New art exhibition
Roland Petersen: The Visual Feast
WHEN: October 26, 2024 – January 5, 2025
WHERE: 1624 Elverhoy Way, Solvang, CA
In a community as appreciative of art as Solvang, it takes something special to get people really excited about an art event. The upcoming exhibition of acclaimed Bay Area painter, Roland Petersen’s paintings at Elverhøj Museum of History and Art (October 26-January 5) is that kind of event: colorful and bold, exciting, and revelatory—and for an artist who has been at work for more than 50 years—wonderfully current and fresh.
The Danish-born American painter was born in 1926 in Endelave, Denmark. He received a B.A. and M.A. degree from U.C. Berkeley before studying with Hans Hoffman at his School of Fine Arts in Provincetown. Recipient of both Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships, Mr. Petersen’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Hirshhorn Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art to name a few.
A seminal Bay Area painter, printer and emeritus professor at U.C. Davis, Petersen makes his mark at Solvang’s Elverhøj Museum with vibrant figurative art. His works synthesize gestural abstract expressionism, painterly realism, and advanced color theory using rich, saturated colors, thick pigment, and striking geometric designs to bring still life, figures, and landscapes together into complex constructs.
Petersen explained his work to the Smithsonian Institution with these words:
“I deal with color relationships, which I try to think of as a sequence of colors that have a kind of rhythm going, as in music. And I try to deal with changing that rhythm upside down, inside out and in any way that I can vary that. The kind of feeling that I am trying to achieve in my work is pretty much a kind of isolation of a person being alone in his own thoughts.”
He notes that it has been the feeling of the work of Georges Seurat rather than Seurat’s pointillist technique that has influenced him—the sense of being alone.
An active figure in the Bay Area art scene for over fifty years, Petersen was one of the first professors in the new art department at the University of California at Davis, where he stewarded the program for more than thirty years and recruited artists such as Wayne Thiebaud, Manuel Neri and Robert Arneson to the faculty. He is well known for the “Picnic Series,” begun in 1959, which depicts the annual ‘Picnic Day’ event at UC Davis.
Mr. Petersen has donated the works in this exhibit to Elverhøj Museum of History and Art and to the county and city of Santa Barbara. Several paintings in the exhibit are on loan from the Santa Barbara County office of Arts and Culture.
An opening reception will be held on October 26 from 4:00 to 7:30 p.m. The public is invited to attend. There is no charge for admission.
Elverhøj Museum of History and Art, located at 1624 Elverhoy Way in Solvang, is open Thursday through Monday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Suggested donation is $5. For more information, visit www.elverhoj.org.
