Peter Van Dyck: A Flight to the World

A Flight to the World was a solo exhibition of paintings by Peter Van Dyck (b. 1978), a painter and draftsman who divides his time between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Elba, Alabama. Van Dyck trained at the Florence Academy of Art, and since 2005 he has taught painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In 2012, American Artist Magazine named him one of its 25 Important Artists of Tomorrow.

His paintings place the viewer somewhere recognizable and turn each window, doorway, sidewalk and street into a way in. The frames inside the pictures, nominally rectangular like the canvases themselves, bow with an optical curvature, a little like eyes looking out from their sockets, and one long panorama is built from stepped, shaped canvases. The paintings at Sugarlift included Steve's Porch, Alabama Studio Interior, Bay Window Goggles, Basement and Main Street Backlit.

Sugarlift's press release described a curious Philadelphia pugnacity in the work: openly romantic, but never settling for an easy, unearned transcendence. Flight in poetry can run toward something or away from it, and Van Dyck's pictures move toward the world, leading the viewer along a route the painter has choreographed.

The exhibition opened to the public on May 5, 2022, and Sugarlift held an opening reception with the artist on May 12. On June 15, Van Dyck came back to the gallery for an evening conversation with Scott Noel, held among the paintings.