My work attempts to reconcile a deep interest in history with a personal,
at times even sentimental, connoisseurship of popular culture.
I am primarily interested in how the most accessible popular images can point to displaced cultural energies, ideological meanings, and historical structures generally deemed extinct. I begin each project with the question: how are the images, genres, and experiences of the past available today? What is for instance the contemporary image of heroism? How does one currently experience the sublime? Or, what does a contemporary image of utopia look like? The results are often surprising updates and pictures of the present revealed as at once clichéd, yet rich with repressed cultural meaning and transgressive possibility. Carrie, cites the signature shot from Brian De Palma’s classic film of the same title. Caught within a moment of seeming transcendence, the teenage psychic is depicted as both a young virgin (her virginity literalized in the film) and a gruesome effigy. Examining the way religious tropes inform even the most conventional genres of popular culture, this painting and the series of which it is part explore the deeply traditional, even culturally orthodox, structures of horror film. In this manner my work often attempts to reconcile a kind of makeshift anthropology with an almost biographical interest in
today’s popular culture.
— Peter Rostovsky

Selected solo exhibitions: 2002: Maze, Turin; 2001: The Project, New York; 1999: The Project, New York.
Selected group exhibitions: 2001: Giò Marconi, Milan; Maze, Turin; 2000: The Project, New York; Rauma Biennale Balticum, Finland; Summer Show, Goldmar Tevis, Los Angeles; 1999: Untold Stories, De Chiara/ Stewart, New York; Paradise 8, Exit Art, New York; Local Color, The Henry Street Settlement, New York.