Danish artist Peter Ravn has done everything from album cover art to conceptual fashion to music videos. But since the turn of the millennium, he’s embraced oil painting, and in the past few years, there’s been a strong theme to his work. Most of Ravn’s paintings depict nondescript, middle-aged men in business suits in a series of surreal and emotionally intense situations — lying on the floor with their feet in the air, curled up in blankets, crawling on the floor, clinging to tables. In one piece, bits of a man’s body are beginning to disappear; in another, one deathly pale management type weeps into the hands of someone who looks almost exactly like him.
These images cast society’s most powerful archetype in an unsettlingly vulnerable light, humanizing the anonymous “suits” we see every day. We recommend you to visit his website to see more.
Peter Rothmeier Ravn (born 1955) is a Danish painter. He holds a master’s degree in architecture and design from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and has studied at Syracuse University (Syracuse, N.Y.) og Parsons School of Design (New York City, N.Y.). Before his debut as an artist, he was a central figure in the Danish field of design and music with his work on design and visual identity, as record cover and poster designer and as a director of music videos.
He was behind a string of remarkable Danish record sleeves and a pioneer of the Scandinavian music video. Through the 1980s and 1990s he developed groundbreaking and visually experimenting work for many of the biggest names in Scandinavian rock and pop.
In the 1990s Ravn was the architect behind the fashion project DEMOCRATS characterised by T-shirts with conceptual graphic designs boasting philosophical, political and often controversial slogans.
Around the millennium Ravn began to paint. Since then, he has been a fast rising star with a number of both solo and group exhibitions in Denmark as well as abroad
ARTWORKS
The Album – 2013. Oil on canvas 50 x 60
The Luggate – 2010. Oil on canvas 80 x 80
Robin the Dog – 2011. Oil on canvas 60 x 50
The Environmentalist – 2014. Oil on canvas 60 x 50