Peter Coffin — À propos — Slash Paris

Often using art history as a departure point for his surreal reinventions, Peter Coffin’s work engages with pre-conceptions about cultural ideals to challenge established perception and interpretation. Taking the form of a giant hand leaning happy-go-lucky against a plinth, Coffin’s Untitled (Unfinished Hand) humorously personifies the tropes of traditional sculpture. Reconfiguring the idealism of modernist art where material purity and the authority of the artistic gesture were held sacrosanct, Coffin monumentalizes the ‘integrity of the artist’s hand’ in wooden planks and wire mesh — the bare bones stuff of modelling.