Background
Peter Downsbrough was born in 1940 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States.
Peter Downsbrough was born in 1940 in New Brunswick, New Jersey, United States.
Downsbrough first studied architecture at the University of Cincinnati and at Cooper Union in New York, then sat in on some drawing classes at the Art Students League. Unsatisfied with all of these approaches, he pursued his development independently.
Since the end of the 1960s, conceptual artist Peter Downsbrough changed the perception about art thoroughly. At the basis of his strong diversified oeuvre, lies a highly distilled, visual vocabulary, which he uses to examine a given space in a very personal and precise manner. In this way, Downsbrough frequently adopts written language in the form of conjunctions, prepositions, verbs, and pronouns and applies them to walls, floors, and ceilings, often in combination with taut lines made of black tape.
Words like ‘as’, ‘if’ or ‘but’ have a double function: on the one hand, they work as iconographic characters, which emphasize and reveal the space, while on the other hand, they offer the viewer several possibilities of interpretation. Despite the impersonal nature of the elements, Downsbrough manages to create a very familiar word/image-universe with minimal interventions and a limited vocabulary.
Peter Downsbrough creates spatial interventions with a minimalist visual vocabulary of letters and lines. Using adhesive black letters to form words, and cloth tape to form lines, Downsbrough applies them to walls, floors, and ceilings, playfully responding to existing architecture, reconfiguring spaces, and subverting the conventional logic of these linguistic elements. His installation GAUGE/OT, created in in 2009, features the word “Gauge” printed vertically and sliced down the middle, its mirror image adhered to an adjacent wall; the other half of it runs along the inside of a diagonally placed square.
Peter Downsbrough has had several solo exhibitions at international institutions, including Mies van der Rohe Haus in Berlin; Espace d’art contemporain in Lyon; S.M.A.K. in Ghent; Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź; FRAC, Bourgogne in Dijon; BOZAR in Brussels; MAMCO in Geneva; Wide White Space in Antwerp; and Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. He also produces artist books composed of text, line drawings, maps, and photographs of urban space.
Downsbrough’s work was also included in numerous group exhibitions, such as Friendly Takeover at Marta, Herford; In the Face of Spatial Grandeur, Circuit at Centre d’art Contemporain, Lausanne; Less Is More: Pictures, Objects, Concepts from the Collection and the Archives of Herman and Nicole Daled 1966 – 1978 at Haus der Kunst, Munich; No Comments at Museu Serralves, Porto; Mamco, Geneva; MACBA, Barcelona; MoMA, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.
His work is also present in many important collections, including The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles; Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; Sammlung Marzona, Staatliche Kunstbibliothek zu Berlin; The Tate Gallery Library in London; Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon; FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais in Dunkerque; MACBA in Barcelona; MAMCO in Geneva; and S.MA.K. in Ghent. He lives and works mainly in Brussels.
Quotations: “With the word, one takes part in a dialogue, a discourse on its precise meaning. (…) The word for me is an object. It has both a precise and a vague meaning. It is a universe one is confronted with. But there is no obligatory way of reading.”
