Cleon Peterson: power, conflict and the human figure

Cleon Peterson is a Los Angeles artist whose paintings, murals and sculptures depict human figures caught in confrontations over power. Born in Seattle in 1973, he studied at Art Center College of Design and Cranbrook Academy of Art. His imagery compresses bodies into forceful shapes: the action can be immediately legible even when the participants remain anonymous. MCA Denver’s artist biography establishes his background and the range of media in his practice.

Figures under pressure

Peterson’s graphic compositions frequently use severe contrasts and a restricted palette. Their apparent visual order contains scenes of struggle, making the relationship between form and subject deliberately uncomfortable. At his 2018 museum exhibition, Shadow of Men, MCA Denver presented murals, paintings and sculpture together, interpreting the opposing figures through violence, mercy and the competing impulses within an individual. That interpretation is more useful than assigning one permanent identity to every dark or light figure.

His 2023 Kaikai Kiki exhibition, Under the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, brought this vocabulary into a group of twenty-seven paintings. Peterson’s accompanying statement connected the work to alienation, the manipulation of public attention and anxieties about technology, politics and consumption. These are the artist’s stated concerns for that exhibition; they help explain why the figures’ actions can feel societal in scale even without depicting a named event. The exhibition also demonstrates that his practice develops through bodies of paintings, rather than only through familiar images reproduced as editions.

Nature and contradiction

The Galápagos project with The Jaunt offers another perspective. In his account of the 2023 journey, Peterson questioned the idea that an untouched landscape could provide an escape from human destructiveness. He instead described people as participants in nature, with creation and destruction inseparable. Read alongside the confrontational figures, that reflection broadens the work beyond a straightforward division between villains and victims. The publisher’s documentation connects the trip to silkscreen production and records his wider use of bronze, canvas and architectural surfaces.

Understanding the editions

Printmaking is an established part of this wider practice. The useful collecting question is how a particular print relates to a painting, exhibition or publisher project, and what changes when an image moves onto paper. The artist’s direct store and publisher archives provide different parts of that history. Titles, color variants and original works should retain their separate identities: a shared composition does not make a painting and a numbered screenprint the same object. Exhibition records and the artist’s own statements provide the durable context against which those individual works can be understood.