Peter Soriano

In the mid-2000s, during a six-month residency at the Atelier Calder in Saché, in Indre-et-Loire in France, he started making wall installations using aluminum tubing, steel cable, and spray paint. The critic Raphael Rubinstein, an editor at Art in America, mentioned these works as examples of what he calls "provisional painting", a style of art intentionally made to appear "casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling." Beginning in 2012, his work became dominated by large-scale, graffiti-like wall paintings made of acrylic and spray paint, carried out on the basis of written instructions, as well as related drawings made on pleated Japanese paper. “Simply put, Soriano has become a sculptor who doesn’t make objects,” wrote the poet and art critic John Yau.

In the 1990s Soriano made large biomorphic sculptures in polyester resin. While his earliest works seemed light-hearted and reminiscent of children's toys, his later sculptures became more “vexing,” to cite a critic, suggestive of industrial tools with an indeterminate purpose.

Peter Soriano (born 1959) is a contemporary artist and sculptor. His works are included in the collections of the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, the Harvard Art Museums at Harvard University, the Fonds national d'art contemporain (FNAC) in Paris, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain, and the Wanås Foundation in Sweden.

Soriano was born in 1959 in Manila, in the Philippines, where his grandfather Andrés Soriano was a prominent industrialist and war hero. He moved to the United States in 1981. He has studios in Penobscot, Maine, and in New York City, where he and his wife, Nina Munk, own a townhouse. Soriano has a BA in history of art from Harvard College, and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has said that he learned painting from his uncle Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo.