• Peggy Preheim

  • Peggy Preheim’s exquisitely rendered drawings, sculptures and photographs explore themes relating to the transience of life and the cyclical nature of human experience. Regarded for her minute and delicate works on paper, the artist draws from personal, found and historical sources to construct evocative narratives that are at once enigmatic yet accessible, strikingly intimate yet universal. Two new films, featured here for the first time, render and recombine images in ways that powerfully address the distance between public and private worlds, the past and the present, the sacred and the secular, the conscious and the subconscious.

  • The video Spheres explores the garment featured in Preheim’s new works on paper.

     

    In Epiphany, watercolor and graphite combine, showing a figure of a child suspended in water, looking within another transparent elliptical form that could elude to the hemispheres of the brain. Upon second look, you see an image of a dress composed of a pentagon and a series of golden rectangles. This dress is part of a suite of garments the artist designed based on geometry related to the human body. In Ophiuchus, the same figure looks into what could be a galaxy. Saturn’s Turn portrays a hexagon cape drawn inside a second hexagon on a small piece of parchment paper. The video serves as a glimpse into Preheim’s studio as well as an attempt to blend inspiration and process.

  • Composed of 632 still photos taken between 2012 and 2021, “Still Life” explores a journey through the psyche. Navigating between horizontal and vertical axis and referencing a cross and the elements, the narrative weaves between a sequence of oppositions through the lens of nature and culture, inside and outside, male and female. A cat from a colony of ferals functions as a catalyst and a narrative guide throughout this compressed drama.

     

    The garments scattered throughout the piece harken back to an exhibition from 2005 titled “Three Sheets to the Wind” where glass vessels and vintage doll sized garments, gathered from flea markets in France, were combined with unfired clay figures, revisited from over a decade earlier. The title of the show simultaneously references the un-still waters of the hero’s journey from the Odyssey and the artist's return to the U.S. after four years in Paris. In addition to the robe or garment, there is a presentation of sculptures and works on paper from that time, including “Mermaid” and “Still Life”, both from 2016, that are only now being presented.

  • Born in 1963 in Yankton, South Dakota, Peggy Preheim lives and works in Yonkers, New York.  She studied at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design from 1981 to 1983, and has since exhibited her work throughout the United States and Europe.

     

    In 2008, the artist presented a solo exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, entitled Little Black Book, which traveled to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma and to the Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University in New York through 2010.  Other notable exhibitions include Quiet Accord, a two-person presentation with Paul Chiappe at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin (2012), Directions in American Drawing, a group show that opened at The Columbus Museum in Georgia in 2007 and traveled to the Telfair Museum in Savannah and the Knoxville Museum of Art in Tennessee through 2008, and Transitional Objects: Contemporary Still Life, a 2006 group show at the Neuberger Museum in New York. 


    Preheim’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, NY, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York, NY Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, among others.