Pete Herzfeld

About the Artist

ARTIST • PROFESSOR • FARMER The digital process is integral throughout my creative process. In the end, it leads to a traditional painting, although it’s far from traditional in its origin. In varying degrees my artwork examines the interface between the peripheries of institutional and urban cultural development: political events, ideology and the supernatural world as overlapping realms where the personal sense of the world is partially fabricated and transformed. Such interests are also considered from diverse vantage points in the works of Jeff Koons, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Shepard Fairey, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger and others. Apart from their individual considerations of issues related to social and historical ideas these artists demonstrate a self-reflexive awareness of the role that painting plays as a medium with specific qualities and historical references. On a formal level my creative activity considers both the painterly surface and the assembled, relational pictorial constructs that is occupied by works created over the last century. Works by the Russian Constructivists and Neo-dadaists such as John Heartfield, Max Ernst, Hannah Höch, Raoul Hausmann and others who have extended the boundaries and conventions of pictorial space to include the third dimension form a referential basis for my artwork. Russian Constructivists like Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko saw their images and objects as explorations of what they termed faktura: the particular material properties of the object, and tektonika, its spatial presence. Their work is considered significant in its challenge to traditional painting and its extension of painting to include physical, constructed qualities while communicating social concerns. My work also seeks to challenge the medium.