ARTIST
Cleon Peterson
Los Angeles painter whose stylised figures stage a struggle between power and submission.
Cleon Peterson is a Los Angeles painter, born in Seattle in 1973, whose work stages a struggle between power and submission: flat, stylised figures locked in conflict, in a deliberately limited palette. He trained first in graphic design, at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, before an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has shown in solo exhibitions from Kaikai Kiki in Tokyo to the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. The collection holds two versions of one screen print, I Against I (2025): the White and the Gold, from a release of three.
I Against I, the white and the gold
Two figures are locked together on the sheet. One, in black, kneels with bared teeth and raises a club, or perhaps a bone, above his head, his other arm pinning a second figure against his chest. That figure arches back, face tipped upward, limbs folded around the body that holds him. A great curving form with a single eye, like a serpent or a fish, arcs over both. The anatomy is drawn in thin, unbroken lines, and a few drops spill to the left. Struggle and embrace are hard to tell apart.
The two versions trade colours. In the White, the second figure is gold against the white sheet. In the Gold, the ground is gold to the deckled edge and the figure turns white, while the black figure stays black in both. It is the same reversal of figure and ground that separates the two great styles of Greek painted pottery, black-figure and red-figure, and it is why the pair reads as two vessels, not one image twice.
I Against I is a hand-pulled screen print, 16 × 16 inches, on 290 gsm Arches Rag paper with deckled edges, released through the artist’s own store in 2025. It came in three versions: the White and the Black in editions of 75, and the Gold in an edition of 25.
Both sheets are signed and dated “25” in pencil at lower right, and numbered in pencil at lower left: 9/75 on the White, 14/25 on the Gold.
Why these prints are in the collection
Peterson’s work turned up in our feed over a long stretch, and while we admired it, much of it sits close to graphic design: angular, flat and poster-sharp, a look we respect but don’t want to live with. I Against I was different. Its figures feel less like graphic design and more like something painted in antiquity, the kind of scene you’d find wrapped around a Greek vase.
The release came in three versions: the White and the Black in editions of 75, and a rarer Gold in an edition of 25. We passed on the Black, which felt too dark, and kept the White and the Gold as a pair. Side by side they look like two vessels from the same workshop, one pale and one gilded. The gold is only faintly metallic. It isn’t shiny so much as warm, with the muted lustre of an old gold vase, and the white beside it completes the pair.
Seeing them together makes a case for treating variants as different objects, not duplicates, a case that’s easier to follow with a sense of how screen printing works.
Cleon Peterson’s wider practice
Peterson was born in Seattle and trained in graphic design at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, graduating with honours in 2004, before an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2006. The training shows in the clarity of his compositions, but the work belongs to painting: large canvases of clashing figures, caught in a struggle between power and submission, which he sets within the shifting architecture of contemporary society.
His statement for a 2023 solo exhibition in Tokyo sets out what drives it. He describes a new age of global crisis, in which dread and alienation spread, politicians summon mobs in the name of power, and consumption is offered as the last thing that connects us. In the pictures, that violence is stylised and ritual, closer to an ancient frieze than to the news.
His solo exhibitions include Under the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars at Kaikai Kiki Gallery in Tokyo (2023), Mr Sinister at Albertz Benda in New York (2022), The Shadow of Men at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2018) and Victory at agnès b.’s Galerie du Jour in Paris (2017). He has also worked at public scale: a project at the Eiffel Tower for Paris’s Nuit Blanche in 2016, the Lasco Project at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, and a mural painted across a roadway in Heerlen, in the Netherlands, in 2021.
Cleon Peterson’s own site holds his paintings, projects and exhibition history, and his Instagram is the place to follow new work. New editions are released through his store, which is how both versions of I Against I came to us.