Offer Box - Peter Pranschke

February 7 - March 6, 2020

St. Louis, MO — Monaco is pleased to present Offer Box, organized by Edo Rosenblith, featuring St. Louis based artist Peter Pranschke. The exhibition opens on Friday, February 7 and runs through March 6.

Monaco’s back room exhibition space accommodates a generous display of small works on paper by Peter Pranschke.  Consisting of several hundred individual drawings, cut portions of drawings, and collages pasted together from their fragments, the show features pieces in various stages of completion that have slowly been collected and reworked over a thirteen-year period.  Scenes and personalities from life and imagination are depicted in equal measure using colored pencil, India ink, erasure and gauche.  This inflated selection of material, sifted from an even larger and more congested pool of otherwise useless debris, highlights the artist's habitual practice of mark making and provides insight into a creative process that yields an overabundance of mindlessly rendered images.

Peter Pranschke, a native to St. Louis, received his BFA in Painting from the University of Missouri - St. Louis in 2003.  Since then he has exhibited his work at numerous artist run and alternative art spaces throughout the area.  Those spaces, many of which are now defunct, include Boots Contemporary Art, PSTL Gallery, Snowflake, Mad Art Gallery, Los Caminos, Museum Blue, The Millitzer Studio & Gallery, The Granite City Art and Design District (G-CADD) and Macklind Appliance.  In addition, his cartoons have been printed in several local zines and periodicals including Shitty River Comics, Bad Jacket, Scuzz Report, All the Art and The Mound City Tattler.  In 2016 Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts published a book of his drawings titled Watch Out: This Might Hurt!!!  

As a child Peter Pranschke was diagnosed with Alport Syndrome, an uncommon hereditary condition that causes hearing loss and renal failure.  He began wearing hearing aids at the age of seven and first underwent hemodialysis at the age of nineteen.  He has had two kidney transplants at St. Louis University Hospital, the first from his mother in 2000 and the second from a cadaver in 2006.  He currently lives with his parents in University City, Missouri and goes for dialysis treatment three times a week at the clinic walking distance from his home.