Peter Alexander

Los Angeles native Peter Alexander made his reputation as a member of the so-called Finish Fetish movement—Southern California artists working with industrial materials often derived from the technology of the local custom car and surf subcultures. Alexander’s specialty was building up cubes and wedges from layers of resin, which often contain other forms—sometimes amorphous, cloud-like shapes, sometimes other geometrical forms. Alexander’s career took an unusual turn in the early 1970s when he abandoned the minimalist sculptural practice that had gained him fame and began exploring a wide range of populist pictorial motifs, including sunsets, night cityscapes, and black velvet paintings of deep-sea life-forms.