Peter Eastman
Biography
Peter Eastman is a South African artist whose practice is rooted in the subtle tensions between visibility and disappearance. Working primarily with surfaces that shift according to light and perspective, Eastman creates paintings that are both materially rich and conceptually elusive. His signature technique—often involving the incising, scraping, and layering of enamel, graphite, resin, or oil on aluminum—produces works that appear and disappear with the viewer’s movement, activating a sensory experience that unfolds over time.
Trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, Eastman began his professional journey in London as a restorer of antiquities. This early encounter with patina, surface history, and the tactile memory of objects continues to inform his visual language. His approach to painting is both physical and reflective, translating an interest in light, environment, and perception into meditative, immersive landscapes.
His subjects often emerge from natural environments—river valleys, dense vegetation, glinting water surfaces—filtered through memory and distilled into quiet, haunting images. In his ongoing body of work focused on deep, forested ravines in the Eastern Cape, Eastman explores the psychological resonance of place, engaging with nature as both motif and metaphor.
Eastman’s work has been widely exhibited in South Africa and internationally. In a landmark exhibition curated by Yacouba Konaté, he presented a series of black portraits at Primo Marella Gallery in Milan, Italy. The project offered a powerful reflection on presence and erasure, and introduced his work to a broader European audience. He was also among a select group of artists commissioned to produce official artworks for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, with his contribution later auctioned by Phillips de Pury in New York.
His paintings are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, and have drawn the attention of collectors and curators such as Primo Barella, who has been a consistent advocate of his work.
Peter Eastman will present his first solo exhibition in Germany with Suburbia Contemporary in May 2025, at the gallery’s Leipzig space.
The Metamorphoses
has been Opened the 3rd and 4th of May at Spinnerei Leipzig on the occasion of the 2oth Anniversary of the Spinnerei Leipzig
CATALOGUE
Exhibition Text in German
In this new series, Eastman deepens his investigation into the shifting relationship between the individual and their environment. His large-scale paintings, created through a distinctive process of engraving and layered application, result in reflective monochrome surfaces that transform depending on light and the viewer’s movement. Here, the image becomes unstable, elusive, and in constant transformation. As Eastman notes: “The figures are transformed by what surrounds them. Their definition depends on the oscillation between the visible and the invisible, between form and formlessness.” Through this tension between clarity and ambiguity, The Metamorphoses reflects on identity as an open, relational condition — never static, always in flux.
The Metamorphoses
by Matteo Innocenti
Nature, understood as the totality of life that occurs, is continually moved by a principle of transformation. As human beings, we are part of it, but uniquely; from ancient times, every civilization has tried to understand natural processes to control them or, at least, to regulate their effects. The Greek source of Western thought has given us some useful terms: nature is physis, the generation of things that grow, and only correct knowledge can function as a remedy for thauma, the human anguish caused by the continuous and unpredictable becoming of everything. Even before philosophy, myths had attempted an explanation of phenomena through narrative form. Fascinating and problematic at the same time, myths have endured over time, by virtue of the fact that imagination is a powerful faculty, not replaceable by rationality; over the ages, they have been taken up, modified, and updated. There is a term that better than any other describes their rich and variable content: metamorphosis.
Peter Eastman places nature and its transformations at the very center of his research. There is a specific place he relates to, a nature reserve he has known for a long time. It is a steep and difficult-to-access river valley, with forests of indigenous old-growth trees; the vegetation there is rich, the colors intense, and the light mobile. It is an unusual beauty, certainly not that of the man-made landscape to which we are more accustomed; as the artist states, “Forests are dense, layered, and shifting. They’re beautiful, but not in a gentle way – their appeal lies in the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the brutal. Growth and decay coexist. The space feels familiar, but also slightly unsettling. I love being in the forest, but it’s not entirely welcoming.”
Such is the scenery from which Eastman derives his paintings. Forests, as a living and complex organism, manifest the processes of their own existence; something grows, something is born or decays, and it is impossible to find a state that remains the same, even one day apart. Added to this is the variability of perceptions and memory, since an observer cannot keep intact what he has seen, but necessarily modifies it. The paintings in the exhibition are the outcome of the relationship between direct experience in the forest and work in the studio.
In a certain way, it could be said that a translation has taken place. Eastman is not interested in landscape painting per se. What fascinates him about uncontaminated nature is the lush chaos, which to the human and rational eye seems perhaps like an indistinct whole. Branches that overlap and intertwine, leaves whose outline is lost in the reflection of a pool, trunks that are barely recognizable in the background. These forests appear as they are, independently of human action. They are the autonomous spectacle of a wild force. For this reason, they can become an exceptional pictorial repertoire. Eastman chooses to represent them through light, which is the fundamental element of vision. His paintings, singularly uniform in tone, have as their real subject the alternating levels of brightness, that is, the relationship on which the appearance or non-appearance of things depends. So not the forms as such, but the conditions of light that reveal or conceal them. Which makes the paintings testimonies of a state that has existed for a certain period, sometimes for a moment, sometimes longer, but which in no way can be repeated identically, because the metamorphosis of nature happens infinitely.
All the works in the exhibition are part of Deep Chine. Series in fieri, which continues over time in relation to the artist’s changing experiences in nature. Especially the most recent paintings include some pools, showing the ripples and play of reflections on their surface. Water recurs often in myth. It is also the emblem of what flows and becomes, as quoted from the very famous Heraclataean fragment : “On those who step into the same rivers, different and different waters flow.”