5 January 2025
Around 1963, Peter Young began to think of himself as a painter. A Los Angeles native who spent two years at Pomona College, in Claremont, California, he moved to New York in 1960 and studied briefly with Theodoros Stamos and Stephen Greene at the Art Students League before enrolling in the art history program at New York University — not yet fully committed to being an artist. But by 1964, a year after graduating from NYU, he was making all-over plaid paintings as well as all-over paintings composed of identically sized, equidistantly placed dots. Although he did not seek gallery representation, he gained considerable attention with these latter works.
While Young used a reductive vocabulary made of dots and lines, he did not identify himself with Minimalist or formalist painting, which insisted on the grid, flatness, and a rejection of nature as a subject. In a video interview on the Gallery Wendi Norris website, he calls himself a “Maximalist.”
Young’s “Maximalism” had its roots in his upbringing. When he was 16, he met the couple Lee Mullican and Luchita Hurtado, both modernist painters. In contrast to their East Coast counterparts, they did not reject mysticism, otherworldliness, and nonwestern sources, or what could be called alternative systems. For them, nature was part of the cosmos, teeming with unseen energy. This is the foundation from which Young developed his preoccupations.
