Peggy Preheim: Little Black Book

10 August 2008 - 8 February 2009
The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut
The book "Peggy Preheim" accompanies the exhition; published by published The Aldrich and Gregory R. Miller & Co. www.aldrichart.org

17 May - 26 July 2009
Philbrook Museum, Tulsa, OK

31 October 2009 - 3 January 2010
Herbert F. Johnson Museum, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY

Relationship of Childhood to Adulthood

The Aldrich Museum exhibits the work of Peggy Preheim with around seventy-five drawings, paintings, sculptural objects, and photographs created between the years 1984 and 2007.

The artist is best known for her rendered pencil drawings on paper - and occasionally on various international bank notes. With these small-scale, tightly rendered drawings she explores imagery related to memory, sexuality, aging, and the complex inner relationship of childhood to adulthood. Her atmospheric black and white photographs are based on her sculptural work.

Peggy Preheim, born in South Dakota, now living in New York, is working for her sculptures with white clay figures and found objects, including furniture, doll’s clothes, and Victorian glass. In the accompanying book you can read in the article "Five Sections for Peggy Preheim" written by Gregory Volk:

"... In Elis I & Elis II, 1995 [...], inspired by a Georg Trakl * poem (“Cease, when your forehead bleeds quietly /Ancient legends . . .”), half of a doll’s broken face in one clay bust and the other half in a second bust affect a union of male and female, destruction and renewal. All of these works arise from a driving interest in transformation: consciousness sloughing off its limits to become radically emboldened, open, and fleet. Preheim, who is otherwise extremely interested in the physical properties of drawings and sculptures, and obsessive about materials, is also a metaphysical seeker with a pronounced visionary streak. ..."

* Georg Trakl, “To the Boy Elis,” trans. Jim Doss and Wersch, April 7, 2007, March 28, 2008 <http://www.literaturnische.de/Trakl/english/seb-e.htm>

Of the title of the exhibition Preheim says, “I think Little Black Book can serve as a provocative and enigmatic summing up of the work in the exhibition. This concept can refer to many things: for me, it refers to the closing of one chapter and the opening of another; the acquisition of language; the “book” which appears in some of my allegorical drawings points to the Book of Revelations.”

Peggy Preheim studied at Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 1981 to 1983. Preheim’s work is included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, amongst others.

Exhibitions, to name only a few: Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; g-module, Paris; and Works on Paper, Los Angeles; Through the looking glass, Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich; ...



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fig.: Peggy Preheim, Miss America, 2004. Collection of Heidi Steiger. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.