Peter Shelton

Host David Colosi in conversation with Peter Shelton, discussing Shelton's sculpture practice. Shelton is an artist who has been populating the world with sculpture since the 1970s, with environmental scaled works, biomorphic forms, and anatomic parallaxes take the sculptural premise of occupying space to its perfect end. Manipulating scale, size, and space; architecture, anatomy, and engineering; inflation, verisimilitude, and poetry, his work engages the minds of our human bodies in a dialog between inside and outside, subject and object, and close encounters with the thingness of Art. A childhood passion for anatomy led him to a BA at Pomona College in California studying at first pre-med, then anthropology and theater, which became the foundations for his sculptural interests when he transitioned to earning trade certifications at Hobart School of Welding in Troy Ohio and an MFA at UCLA. Shelton has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, multiple NEA grants and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant; he has shown nationally and internationally, primarily with L.A. Louver and Gallery Sperone (currently Sperone Westwater); his work is part of the collections of most Modern and Contemporary art museums in the United States and Europe among which include the Panza and Eli Broad Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the LA County Museum, MoMA in New York and San Francisco, MoCA in Los Angeles, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Walker Art Center; and he currently has four public commissions in the cites of Seattle, Indianapolis and Los Angeles, the last of which has been his home and base of operations since the mid-1970s.

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