Bio
Peter Tangen lived his life as an artist. He graduated from the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 1956 and was honored with the prestigious Vanderlipp Award which gave him the opportunity to travel throughout Europe painting and studying. Inspired and dedicated, he returned to Minneapolis to prepare for a one man show at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Following the exhibition he moved to New York City where he worked at the Museum of Modern Art by day and painted by night. During this period his work was widely exhibited around Manhattan. Frustrated by the state of the art in the mid-60’s he withdrew to San Francisco where he has spent the last four decades focused on his art. His life’s work has resulted in hundreds of pieces and he has not shown his work publicly since the mid 1960’s.
The artist Peter Tangen photographed in Los Angeles in 2001 by Dad’s friend Erin
This collection documents a body of work completed from the early 1990’s through today. It is the result of years of work exploring the process of layering and collage, color and pattern, order and disorder, chaos and symmetry, reason versus emotion. It is in one respect rooted in an expressionistic approach but is also brought about by a certain objective logic and reasoning that gives each piece its own identity.
Most pieces are sized between 12-inches and 30-inches square.
