Peter Fagundo defines and redefines an approach to painting that explores the medium’s ever-changing role as a networked form of public communication and a method by which one continually discovers themselves.

From his adolescence in the ‘70s and ‘80s, Fagundo grew up looking for meaning in a lapsed Catholic, new age spiritual home in suburban Minnesota. Despite having a steady habit of drawing and painting as a teenager, Fagundo would study economics and psychology, only hearing his calling to paint well after his undergraduate years. Now a long-time professor at the School Of The Art Institute of Chicago, Fagundo is deeply admired among curators, artists, and aesthetic aficionados for his perspective and approach to making contemporary art.

Fagundo compartmentalizes compositions - abstract elements, text, and figurative tableaux collide on the pictorial plane, forming paintings within paintings, and causing the viewer to hold multiple works simultaneously in their mind’s eye. Much of the content for Fagundo’s practice is appropriated from drawings or scraps of text he has made and saved for years - simultaneously palimpsestic and reiterative. The process is one of amalgamation and a stab at disentangling his drive to make both figurative and abstract works.

Recently, a number of Fagundo’s paintings are direct, but intuitively painted appropriations of photographs by the late German photographer Helmut Newton. Working from a number of oversized publications of the works of the acclaimed Berlin photographer, Fagundo selects an image and employs it as a readymade subject. Sensual and moody, Newton’s photographs are swiftly transposed by Fagundo’s hand, working deftly wet-into-wet with surgical realist precision. The resulting works are the result of daily repetition, a repeating of the photograph as a painting. With this friction between the ritualized nature of their production and the inherently gratifying cinematic noir nature of the originally photographic content, Fagundo positions the work as a casual ace, a sly hack, and a bit of a laugh at pleasure - the pleasure of painting, and the joy we can share in it together.

Peter Fagundo (American, b. 1971 in St. Cloud, MN) lives and works in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include Ours Is The Hand That Sews Time (2024) (with Jake Fagundo) at M. LeBlanc, Lovely American Disaster (2021) at The Suburban in Milwaukee, and Pirates Booty (2019) at Shane Campbell Gallery in Chicago. Fagundo’s work has also been included in the group exhibitions; Master Class: Inside the Last American Museum School (2025) at Secrist | Beach Gallery in Chicago, Moreover: 50 Paintings (2024) at Green Gallery in Milwaukee and Nice To Meet You (2023) at Bridge Mogura in Tokyo. Fagundo’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago and numerous private and corporate collections.