RAiR | 1991

Peter Zokosky

Born in Long Beach, California, Peter Zokosky (1957- ) acquired his BA from the University of California, Riverside in 1979 and subsequently earned a MFA from the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1981. Afterwards he became a professor of painting at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, then the Chair of MFA in Drawing and Painting at the Laguna College of Art and Design at Laguna Beach, California. Peter regularly instructed and lectured at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. His strong interest in anatomy inspired his artwork. Peter exhibited in 15 solo exhibitions between 1979 and 2009 and was awarded the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation Residence Grant in Westport Island, Maine in 2003-04. His work is held in the public collections of, amongst others, the Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Bermuda and the Longbeach Museum of Art, California.

Peter has shown his work extensively in California. He is a painter who loves the old masters, especially in the Baroque era. He also has a taste for the macabre. One critic says of his painting:  “Zokosky’s works are a haunting treatment of some of the more traditional themes in art: death, sex, and our place in the universe. (He) mounts a gentle invasion of our psyches and plants a bomb upon arrival.” His one painting in the Anderson Museum is a small, finely-executed depiction of a dog- or wolf-like skeleton in a barren landscape, a searing and forceful image.