PETER HELINSKI | Lost and Found | AL’S OFFICE AND SHELF
March 2 - April 11, 2025
I have been exploring the enormous and deeply personal themes of life, death, forgiveness and redemption through my work for my most of my life. As a child, I enjoyed trips to the town dump with my dad, always tempted to sneak home someone else’s tossed junk, to become a salvaged treasure of my own. As an artist, the use of found materials in my work, whether discarded, forgotten, lost or just passed by, allows me to focus on those themes as I redefine what can be valuable and important.
With my sculpture, I think about the past while also imagining another future. I begin my practice by scavenging for sticks, an organic and precise process. These perfectly imperfect sticks become the heart of this work. They are cut and painted and, along with wire and twine, are assembled into minimal, abstract figures. The spool of wire I use, I found discarded years ago on a Manhattan street. The twine has been either found or purchased from True Value. The act of finding materials is integral to my work and becomes almost a performance itself.
My drawings feature a certain everyman of sorts facing today’s challenging world. Similar to my sculptures, I use found materials in my drawings as well. The explosion of Amazon deliveries have provided many of my canvases – cardboard, on which I use china marker.
Peter Helinski (1957, Greenport, NY) is an American sculptor, painter and curator. He has been making art his entire life, often with found materials: as a child, papier-mâché from old newspaper, later, found-paper collage and assemblage, a found-object blog, discarded tin and plastic sculptures and cardboard prints. Currently, he’s creating found-wood sculptures and drawings on discarded cardboard. His work has been included in exhibitions at Buffalo AKG Art Museum, peopleart/bflo, New York University and Parrish Art Museum. He lives and works in Pine Plains, NY.