American Art Catalogues presents Peter Cain: The Los Angeles Photographs, an exhibition of drawings, photographs, and painting created in 1996 shortly before the artist’s death. This is the artist’s first show in New York in ten years. The exhibition is supported by a catalogue featuring the entire series of photographs.
The Los Angeles Photographs, a group of 98 images from 1996, is one of Peter Cain’s final artworks. Taken across West Hollywood, Glendale, and Burbank, they capture the feeling of driving through LA at that time: anonymous mini malls, gas stations seemingly everywhere, grand opening flags flapping in the wind, a mountain range looming in the distance. Though thirty years have passed and many of these businesses are gone, a handful of locations remain untouched. In the images, Cain seems to fixate on the easily overlooked details like carefully planted perennials underneath a 7-Eleven sign or unintentionally poignant signage at the gas station that says “self.”
Cain had a singular way of seeing the world around us. In his art, he augmented everyday sights and scenes to give his audience a new perspective of how strange and beautiful such things can be. He first became well-known in the 1990s for his paintings of oddly reconfigured cars set against airless backgrounds without a sign of a human driver in sight. Featured in prominent exhibitions and biennials, Cain’s paintings resonated with the time, touching upon anxieties that ran through 1990s American culture including alienation and loneliness, ever-heightening consumerism, and a sense of technology beginning to run rampant.
Peter Cain (b. 1959, New Jersey; d. 1997 New York) was an American artist recognized for his meticulously rendered paintings and drawings depicting surreal and aberrant transformations of automobiles. His work is frequently understood as synthesizing elements of Surrealism and Photorealism, combining precise technical execution with imaginative distortion. His work has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions in the United States and internationally. Cain’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Cain died at the age of thirty-seven from a cerebral hemorrhage. His estate is represented by Matthew Marks Gallery.
