Peter Plagens

[2][19][7] Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel described Plagens's painting as a "fusion of high-flying refinement and everyday awkwardness" with an intellectual savvy, disdain for snobbery and ungainliness he likened to Willem de Kooning's work.

[6] Reviewing Plagens's 2018 exhibition,[20] New York Times critic Roberta Smith called the show an "eye-teasing sandwich of contrasting formalist strategies," the hard-won result of a decade of focused experimentation.

[21] He left USC an abstract painter, influenced by Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn and Elmer Bischoff, which set him at odds with the somewhat conservative painting faculty at Syracuse University (MFA, 1964) where he did his graduate studies.

[34][15][6] Increasingly minimal works, such as Cleveland Defaults on Its Debts (1979) or Cubist Landscape (1980), have been recognized for carefully calibrated compositions that challenged conventional rules about balance and probed the line between elegance and awkwardness, and friction and harmony.

[35][7][21][32] In pivotal paintings of the mid-1980s, such as Wheels of Wonder (1985) and Wedge of Life (1987),[6] Plagens incorporated angular, eccentric polygons, greater surface variation and a new sense of movement that reviewers such as Grace Glueck deemed "witty balancing acts.

"[36][32][37] During this time, he also created the drawing series "My Father Worked in Advertising" (1986), which featured dappled, abstract expressionist-like areas around the edges over which he painted and collaged fields of color and hard-edged and irregular shapes.

[6][38][39] In paintings such as Benton Way and Sunset, LA, 6/28/55, 1:40 pm (1989) and Learning of the Tragic News (1996),[40] he introduced expressive drips and gestural, free-form marks and shapes, that Michael Kimmelman wrote had "a looping calligraphic eloquence" recalling Arshile Gorky and Richard Diebenkorn.

[38][41][17] Of particular note were the small, brightly colored, discordant geometric forms that Plagens set against primarily off-white and slate-gray backdrops, which critics suggested "snapped" his rhythmic compositions into place.

[15] In the 2010s, Plagens garnered some of the best reviews of his career[2][23][33] for shows that critics described, variously, as "jaunty, accomplished disquisitions"[3] or heated, "intimate discourses"[31] exploring the co-existence of incompatible styles, formal concepts and paint application in single works.

"[33][2][44] Critics suggested that these badges mediated an ongoing flux between coherent wholes and fluid parts, order and disorder, freedom and restraint,[33][31] establishing an uneasy, but engaging, "strange harmony.

[15][57] Plagens has written catalogue essays for the artists Jim DeFrance,[58] Tony DeLap,[59] Don Gummer,[60] Ron Linden,[61] Nick Miller[57] and Edward Ruscha,[62] and for the exhibitions "Clay's Tectonic Shift: John Mason, Ken Price, and Peter Voulkos, 1956–1968"[63] and "Pasadena to Santa Barbara" (both 2012).