Peter Hristoff
"Peter Hristoff’s layered compositions fuse decorative pattern with allegory, turning desire, belief, and the human condition into vivid, collectible worlds. Each piece offers immediate visual pleasure and long-term discovery; an image that keeps opening as you live with it."
Devon Dunham
Executive Director
Peter Hristoff (b. 1958, Istanbul) is a painter and draftsman whose richly layered images move between pleasure and mortality, humor and dread holding the viewer in the charged space where desire, belief, and the human condition collide. Living and working between New York and Istanbul, Hristoff brings a cross-cultural visual vocabulary to works that fuse decorative pattern, cinematic storytelling, and art-historical quotation.
Across series including In the Garden and his ongoing works on paper Everything and Nothing (begun 2007), Hristoff often employs flat silhouetted figures, stand-ins for the self and for “man in general.” Set against ornate fields of flowers, skulls, celestial skies, and geometric compartments that read as metaphors for moving through physical space and through time. Influences range from Turkish Iznik tile design and late Gothic/Early Renaissance imagery to the animated dream-logic of early Disney, producing compositions that feel like stills from an unfolding, mythic narrative.
Untitled HM83 | 2007 - 2023 | Silkscreen, Painting, Drawing, Ink | 15.5 x 11 in.
In the Garden, pleasure is not framed as a distant paradise but as something immediate and “ready-to-hand,” revealed through abundant layering that refuses any single, final meaning. In Homoerectus (2024), selections from Everything and Nothing turn toward classical antiquity with phallocentric, homoerotic imagery that can function as both critique of male ego and celebration of gay lust. Pairing ancient Greek and Latin phrases with references drawn from museum sketches, life drawing, and vintage printed porn.
Hristoff earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts (full scholarship, 1981) and an MFA from Hunter College (1983), and teaches painting and drawing at SVA. His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S., Turkey, and Europe, and he has received awards including a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (1994) and a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Drawing (1997).