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Peter Coffin (artist)

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American artist
Peter Coffin
Born1972 (age 52–53)
Berkeley, California, US
AwardsSmithsonian Fellow
2009
Websitepetercoffinstudio.com

Peter Coffin (born 1972, Berkeley, California, United States) is an artist based in New York City.

Education

Coffin graduated from the University of California, Davis, where he received a B.A. and B.S. He studied under Conrad Atkinson and Lynn Hershman Leeson and connected with California funk artist Robert Arneson and conceptual artist Stephen J. Kaltenbach. He received an M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. Following his graduate studies, Coffin moved to New York where he assisted artists Sarah Sze and Joseph Kosuth.

Work

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Peter Coffin's diverse practice encompasses sculpture, installation, video, sound and two-dimensional art. His art explores conceptual points of view that invite new perspectives and engender inquiry. Art critic Roberta Smith describes "his penchant for a provocative generosity that fuses aspects of the work of John Cage, Michael Asher and James Lee Byars with strategies akin to those of the Pied Piper." Playful ideation is the hallmark of Coffin's artwork, utilizing culture, representation, point of view and questions to examine consciousness and apperception. As French critic and curator Nicolas Bourriard notes, Coffin's art "explores the accepted and expected reality with the imagination that constitutes the concrete source of art today." Reference points for Coffin's art include epistemology, science, spaciality, language, and Idea Art. Writer Melissa Gronlund notes, "Coffin's lo-fi and DIY aesthetic suggests his awareness of the absurdity of his constant demand that inert, nonsignifying subjects be rendered loquacious ... In his cheerfully appropriated spiritualism, anything is potentially meaningful."

In 2001 Coffin installed a greenhouse in Andrew Kreps Gallery, NY where musicians were invited to play music for plants, highlighting a cultural phenomenon of the 1970s when research of plant consciousness was afoot. Similarly, Untitled (Play), 2008, Untitled (Dreaming Seagull), 2006, and Untitled (Prelapsarian), 2012, encourage viewers to imagine consciousness outside of their own. Continuing this investigation, Coffin drew inspiration from Carl Jung's Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, to create a full-scale UFO modeled after popular representations and documented sightings, and initially flew it over the Baltic Sea in 2008 while a team of sociologists interviewed witnesses. Subsequent flights include the southwest coast of Brazil in 2010 and the Mojave Desert in 2013. A similar approach was taken to playfully interrogate art engagement in a series of museum exhibitions Untitled (Tate Britain), Untitled (Pompidou) and Untitled (Smithsonian Museum) animating artworks from the collection with choreographed sound and video projection that changed the appearance of artworks.

Other projects introduce spatiality to recontextualize and explore perspective, to compare improvisation with free movement Untitled (Free Jazz Mobile), represent multiple dimensions of space with models (Untitled (Hollow Log with Model of the Universe), and reform representations in physical space to access metaphorical space Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes).

Exhibitions

Coffin's work has been the subject of several solo exhibitions, including the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. (2012); the Center d'art Contemporarian, Ivry (2010); The Barbican, London (2009); City Hall Park, New York City (2009),; the Aspen Art Museum (2009); the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco (2009); Centre d'Art Contemporain, Fribourg (2008); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007); the Horticultural Society of New York (2007); and le Confort Moderne, Poitier (2007). Coffin has had solo gallery exhibitions with National Exemplar, NY; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; Venus Over Manhattan, NY; Gallery Fonti, Naples, Italy; Carl Kostyál Gallery, London; Herald St, London; Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin, Paris; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Michael Benevento Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; and Perrotin Gallery, Paris.

His work has been exhibited in exhibitions at the Singapore Art Museum; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (All 2014); The Geffen Contemporary at MoCA, Los Angeles, CA; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY, (Both 2012); Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, Japan, Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France; Le Musée Océanographique, Villa Paloma in Monaco (All 2011); Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (Both 2010), Museo D'Arte Contemporanea Roma (2009); Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR, Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Tate Britain, London, UK (All 2009), Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK; Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Vigo, Spain; Tate Modern, London, England; Lenin Museum, Moscow, Russia; le Confort Moderne, Poitier, France; Musée d´art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland (All 2007); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zürich, Switzerland; Wanås Sculpture Park, Skåne, Sweden (Both 2006); PS1/MoMA, NY, (2005, 2004 & 2001); South London Gallery, London, UK (2004).

Collections

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Work by the artist are in permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; the French National Arts Council Collection; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the Berkeley Art Museum, the University of California at Berkeley, California; the de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Haute-Vienne – Rochechouart, France; the Yokohama Museum of Art, Japan; and the Museo Jumex, Mexico City among others.

Audio work

Peter Coffin has exhibited sound art under his own name and anonymously. In 2005, Coffin published a Music for Plants compilation album with contributions from Ara Peterson, Ariel Pink, Arto Lindsay, Sun Burned Hand of the Man, Jutta Koether, Alan Licht & Tom Verlaine, David Grubbs, LoVid, Anthony Burdin Liam Gillick, Z's Christian Marclay, Dearraindrop, and No Neck Blues Band among others. Two subsequent volumes were compiled and will be published in the future. Coffin has also published Gallery Soundtracks and Music Interpreted by the Brain.

References

  1. "Acting To Pretend, Preteding To Act: Peter Coffin — Mousse Magazine and Publishing". www.moussemagazine.it. February 1, 2009.
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  3. Smith, Roberta; Rosenberg, Karen; Johnson, Ken (25 April 2008). "Art in Review". The New York Times.|title=Art in Review
  4. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2009). Altermodern: Tate Triennial edited by Nicolas Bourriaud. London: Tate. ISBN 9781854378170.
  5. Gronlund, Melissa (2009). Vitamin 3-D: new perspectives in sculpture and installation. London ; New York, NY: Phaidon. ISBN 978-0714849744.
  6. "Untitled (Greenhouse) by Peter Coffin with a Performance by Jim O'Rourke". YouTube. 7 August 2024.
  7. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(animal-play-video-wall) |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio | title= Untitled (Play)
  8. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(dreaming-seagull) |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio | title= Untitled (Dreaming Seagull)
  9. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(prelapsarian) |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio |title=Untitled (Prelapsarian)
  10. Jung, Carl (1979). Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Princeton University Press. ISBN 978-0691018225.
  11. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/art-project-untitled-(ufo)-1 |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio | title= Untitled (UFO)
  12. https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(tate-britain). {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) | title= Untitled (Tate Britain)
  13. https://petercoffinstudio.com/smithsonian-animation. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help) | title= Untitled (Pompidou)
  14. https://petercoffinstudio.com/smithsonian-animation. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)|title=Untitled (Smithsonian Museum)
  15. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(free-jazz-mobile) |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio |title=Untitled (Free Jazz Mobile)
  16. {{Cite web|url=https://petercoffinstudio.com/untitled-(log-with-model-of-the-universe) |title=More info — Peter Coffin Studio |title=Untitled (Hollow Log with Model of the Universe)
  17. https://petercoffinstudio.com/sculpture-silhouette. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)|title=Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes)
  18. "Peter Coffin: Here & There".
  19. "LE CRÉDAC". LE CRÉDAC.
  20. "Peter Coffin | Barbican". www.barbican.org.uk. 11 February 2009.
  21. "Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes)". Public Art Fund.
  22. Oksenhorn, Stewart (22 July 2009). "For artist's Aspen project, it ain't just the blues". www.aspentimes.com.
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  24. "Friart – Yellow Outline". Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg. 13 September 2008.
  25. "Palais de Tokyo". palaisdetokyo.com (in French).
  26. Giaimo, Cara (20 September 2017). "The Plant-Loving Artist Who Puts Pants on Trees". Atlas Obscura.
  27. "confort moderne". www.confort-moderne.fr.
  28. "- 2013 (gallery 2), Peter Coffin -". thenationalexemplar.squarespace.com.
  29. https://www.baldwingallery.com/archive/exhibitions/2015/coffin-mapplethorpe/. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  30. "Peter Coffin - A, E, I, O, U - Exhibitions - Venus Over Manhattan". www.venusovermanhattan.com.
  31. "PETER COFFIN – Hello headspace". Galleria Fonti (in Italian). 31 March 2016.
  32. "The Prelapsarian – Carl Kostyál".
  33. "Peter Coffin". Herald St.
  34. "Peter COFFIN - Contemporary Art Exhibition". www.perrotin.com.
  35. "Michael Benevento". beneventolosangeles.com.
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  37. "Still Moving: A Triple Bill On The Image | Singapore Art Museum;". www.singaporeartmuseum.sg.
  38. "INFINITE JEST". SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT. 5 June 2014.
  39. "Dissident Futures, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, 2013-14". abacus.bates.edu.
  40. "Transmission LA: AV Club". www.moca.org.
  41. "Storm King : Exhibition : Light & Landscape [EXH.116]". collections.stormking.org.
  42. "Untitled (Designs for the Colby Poster Co., Museum of Fine Arts Boston Set)". collections.mfa.org.
  43. Matsui, Midori (1 May 2011). "Yokohama Triennale 2011". Artforum.
  44. "Dystopia | Capc". www.capc-bordeaux.fr.
  45. "OCEANOMANIA". NMNM - Nouveau Musée National de Monaco.
  46. "Still / Moving | The Israel Museum, Jerusalem". www.imj.org.il.
  47. Nast, Condé. "Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum". The New Yorker.
  48. "NatureNation". MUSEUM ON THE SEAM.
  49. "Explore Altermodern | Tate". www.tate.org.uk.
  50. https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2008/event/martian-museum-of-terrestrial-ar. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  51. "Level 2 Gallery: Learn to Read | Tate Modern". Tate.
  52. "2nd Moscow Biennale 2007 at Moscow Biennale Moscow - Artmap.com". artmap.com.
  53. "While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body – an Exhibition about..." Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst (in German).
  54. "Greater New York 2005 | MoMA".
  55. "Collection (Or, How I Spent a Year) | MoMA".
  56. "B Hotel | MoMA".
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  61. https://lesfrac.com/. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
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  63. "BAMPFA". bampfa.org.
  64. "De Young".
  65. https://musee-rochechouart.com/. {{cite web}}: Missing or empty |title= (help)
  66. "Yokohama Museum of Art / Collection Search / Untitled（COFFIN, Peter）". inventory.yokohama.art.museum.
  67. "Searches". Museo Jumex.
  68. "Greater New York 2005". wps1.org. MoMA PS1. Archived from the original on 2007-07-01. Retrieved 2024-02-18. Music for Plants: Peter Coffin's Record Release Party
  69. "Peter Coffin, Perfect If On , 2002". Greenmuseum.org. Archived from the original on 2007-10-09. Retrieved 2024-02-18.
  70. "Music Interpreted by the Brain by Peter Coffin, Perfect If On, 2004". Discogs. 2004.

External links

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