Peter Alexander, whose work was instrumental in the West Coast Light and Space movement, has died at the age of 81. The news was confirmed by Parrasch Heijnen Gallery in Los Angeles. Alexander’s minimal sculptures were typically cast in Urethane, a type of resin, and produced in a single colour from a day-glo palette. 3/27/17 (Brilliant Blue Lectern) (2017) is as the title suggests, a semi-transparent block, mounted on a plinth. Other works are wall-mounted or free standing: the seven panel Indio (2015) consists of differently-coloured Urethane bars hung in parallel; the artist’s Needle series appeared like luminous stalagmites emerging from the gallery floor.
While Alexander was dedicated to sculpture in recent decades – a return to the style that made his name in the late 1960s – during the 1970s the artist created a series of glitter-and-collage paintings on unstretched black velvet. In 2003 he was commissioned to paint a vast mural for Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles.
The Orange County Museum of Art staged a retrospective in 1990 and in 2011 he was part of three exhibitions associated with the Getty initiative Pacific Standard Time. He received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1980, and the California Art Award in 2014. Alexander’s work is held in the collections of the Broad Foundation, Los Angeles; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
