About the Artist

Peter Alexander (February 27, 1939 – May 26, 2020) was an American artist and an important part of the Light and Space artistic movement in southern California in the 1960s.

Alexander was born in Los Angeles on February 27, 1939. His family had been residing in Southern California for four generations and operated oil fields.He originally intended to go into architecture, studying at the University of Pennsylvania (1957–1960); the Architectural Association in London (1960–1962); the University of California, Berkeley (1962–1963); the University of Southern California (1963–64); and the University of California, Los Angeles (1964–65 and 1965–66). At UCLA, he earned first a bachelor's degree in 1965, and then a Master of Fine Arts three years later.



After initially working as an architect - he was a protégé of architectural visionaries Richard Neutra and William Pereira - Alexander rose to prominence in the 1960s with translucent resin sculptures. Having nurtured a lifelong love of surfing, he used resin to fix his boards for many years. Alexander’s decision to utilize resin as an artistic material in the early 1960s was something of an epiphany. He had poured the material into a Dixie Cup to seal his surfboard, but found that over time the resin hardened into a translucent circle. This realization heralded the creation of Alexander’s iconic polyester resin sculptures that would position him as a key figure in the Los Angeles art scene and a vanguard of the California Light and Space movement, alongside his contemporaries Robert Irwin, Doug Wheeler, and Larry Bell.

In the 1970s, formal similarities between Alexander’s sculptures and the work by Minimal artists in New York such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt were noted. They too worked with non-traditional materials and eliminated traces of personal touch. The resin works’ luminous transparency, however, typifies the Light and Space movement.


Throughout his career, Alexander found inspiration for his art through a multitude of sources, including geometry, the landscape of his native California, the phenomen- ological effects of color and light, and perspectival nuance. He maintained a deep interest in the work of Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, particularly his ability to embed his works with “that certain quality of light, that quality of being under water.” Mark Rothko’s approach to color and mark making also served as a cornerstone for Alexander’s practice, and he once said, “I’ve always loved Rothko and the sensibility [within the edges he creates], so I decided to cast objects that had those kinds of edges that disappeared.”

Although he utilized resin extensively in his early works, Alexander stopped working with the material around 1972 after it caused him to be hospitalized. He subsequently turned to painting during the next three decades, doing so on canvas, paper and velvet and explored drawing, lithography, and polaroid photography. The theme of these works was inspired by the landscape, light and other natural phenomena around his hometown.

When examining his work in these alternate mediums, the artist’s attentiveness to color becomes incredibly evident. In a 1971 interview, Alexander said, “Part of the concern that I have with color is that a very slight varying color could alter how you felt about it or you felt toward it or the kind of vibrations it sent off.”

Alexander only went back to producing sculptures after 2006, when one of his resin sculptures at the Centre Pompidou was destroyed before an exhibition. The museum not only compensated him for the sculpture, but also funded him to make a replacement. He was able to employ urethane, a less toxic material that was more effective at displaying pigment.

Alexander was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (1980) and the California Art Award (2014). He was artist-in-residence at several institutions, including the California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA, 1970-71), University of Colorado (Boulder, CO, 1981), and Sarabhai Foundation (Ahmedabad, India, 1983).

In 1999, the Orange County Museum of Art (Newport Beach, CA) mounted a retrospective exhibition titled “Peter Alexander: In this Light”. In 2011 he was part of the landmark “Pacific Standard Time” intitative at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, California (Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture 1950-1970).

Alexander died on May 26, 2020, at his home in Santa Monica at the age of 81.

Alexander’s work has been widely exhibited worldwide since the mid-1960s, including at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Diego Museum of Art, CA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; among others.

His work is held in numerous institutional collections, including: The Getty, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

Recent exhibitions include: “The Bunker Artspace: Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody”, West Palm Beach, FL (2024); “On the Edge: Los Angeles Art 1970s–1990s from the Joan and Jack Quinn Family Collection”, Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA (2024); “Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s–80s”, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2023); “Light, Space, Surface: Selections from LACMA’s Collection”, Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA (2023); and “Light & Space”, Copenhagen Contemporary, Copenhagen, Denmark (2022).



biographical sources include PACE Gallery; Franklin Parrasch Gallery ; johnmoran.com; zandergalerie; others


Download Full Biography