Peter Fagundo defines and redefines an approach to painting that explores the medium’s shifting role as both a networked form of public communication and a method of continual self-discovery. Raised in suburban Minnesota within a lapsed Catholic, New Age spiritual household, Fagundo spent his adolescence in the 1970s and ’80s searching for meaning. Though he developed a steady habit of drawing and painting as a teenager, he initially pursued economics and psychology before recognizing his true calling to paint well after college. Now a long-standing professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Fagundo is widely admired among curators, artists, and aesthetic interlocutors for his singular approach to contemporary art. His compositions are compartmentalized, fusing abstract elements, text, and figurative tableaux in ways that produce layered, recursive images—paintings within paintings—that ask viewers to hold multiple interpretations in their mind’s eye at once. Much of his material is sourced from an ongoing archive of personal sketches and textual fragments, making his practice both palimpsestic and iterative, a slow amalgamation that seeks to untangle the pull between figuration and abstraction.

Recently, Fagundo has turned his attention to a series of paintings based on photographs by the late Helmut Newton, drawing directly from oversized monographs of the German photographer’s work. Transposing Newton’s moody, sensual images into paint with swift wet-into-wet precision, Fagundo renders them with surgical clarity and interpretive immediacy. Each work is the product of daily repetition, the photograph restaged as painting, where the friction between Newton’s cinematic noir and the ritualized process of painting becomes central. In these translations, Fagundo’s work lands somewhere between homage and provocation—a casual ace, a sly hack, a painter’s joke on pleasure itself, shared and sustained through the joy of making.

Peter Fagundo (American, b. 1971 in St. Cloud, MN) lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Ours Is The Hand That Sews Time (2024) (with Jake Fagundo) at M. LeBlanc, Lovely American Disaster (2021) at The Suburban in Milwaukee, and Pirates Booty (2019) at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. Fagundo’s work has also been included in the group exhibitions; Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School (2025) at Secrist | Beach Gallery in Chicago, Moreover: 50 Paintings (2024) at Green Gallery in Milwaukee and Nice To Meet You (2023) at Bridge Mogura in Tokyo. Fagundo’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and numerous private and corporate collections.

EXHIBITIONS

September 26th to November 2nd 2024
Ours is the Hand That Sews Time