Peter Eastman: Beira Paintings

Strauss & Co and Suburbia Contemporary present Peter Eastman: Beira Paintings, a series of artworks that explore the tension between invisibility and revelation. Inspired by the enigmatic Scottish landscapes, these dark, layered canvases invite viewers to contemplate the powerful, dramatic force of light as it emerges from the depths.

The Beira Paintings Exhibition by Peter Eastman presents a series of artworks that explore the tension between invisibility and revelation. Painted within the darkness of the Scottish winter, these dark, layered canvases invite viewers to contemplate light as a distant, almost remembered force. Rather than being directly inspired by the Scottish landscape, the works reflect on the experience of South African light when one is no longer immersed in it, allowing light to emerge from depth, absence, and contrast. In a state of slow, perceptually active immersion, Eastman’s images present themselves as fleeting apparitions, caught between memory and intuition. Each canvas captures specific, unrepeatable atmospheric and luminous conditions, emphasizing that seeing is an interpretative, mobile, and unstable act. Radical works of Peter Eastman, where the interplay between the forest and light remains in constant transformation. This exhibition offers a unique opportunity to experience contemporary art that challenges conventional perceptions and captivates the viewer.

Peter Eastman’s Beira Paintings operate at the threshold of visibility. Built through dark, stratified surfaces, these canvases do not represent the forest as landscape but as a resistant visual field, where light acts less as illumination than as an event that briefly allows form to surface. Trunks, branches, and reflections appear without stabilizing into image. The eye moves across the density of the painting searching for orientation, yet every point of balance remains provisional. Seeing here is not immediate but negotiated over time. The forest becomes an autonomous presence, indifferent to the viewer’s desire for clarity. Each painting records a singular atmospheric condition, suggesting that vision is always contingent — the result of an encounter between body, space, and duration. Eastman’s work asks for sustained attention. Images do not assert themselves; they unfold gradually, revealing painting as a temporal experience rather than a fixed representation.

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About

Peter Eastman is a South African artist whose practice is rooted in the subtle tensions between visibility and disappearance. Working primarily with surfaces that shift according to light and perspective, Eastman creates paintings that are both materially rich and conceptually elusive. His signature technique, often involving the incising, scraping, and layering of enamel, graphite, resin, or oil on aluminum, produces works that appear and disappear with the viewer’s movement, activating a sensory experience that unfolds over time.
Trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, Eastman began his professional journey in London as a restorer of antiquities. This early encounter with patina, surface history, and the tactile memory of objects continues to inform his visual language. His approach to painting is both physical and reflective, translating an interest in light, environment, and perception into meditative, immersive landscapes.
His subjects often emerge from natural environments—river valleys, dense vegetation, glinting water surfaces, filtered through memory and distilled into quiet, haunting images. In his ongoing body of work focused on deep, forested ravines in the Eastern Cape, Eastman explores the psychological resonance of place, engaging with nature as both motif and metaphor.
Eastman’s work has been widely exhibited in South Africa and internationally. In a landmark exhibition curated by Yacouba Konaté, he presented a series of black portraits at Primo Marella Gallery in Milan, Italy. The project offered a powerful reflection on presence and erasure, and introduced his work to a broader European audience. He was also among a select group of artists commissioned to produce official artworks for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa, with his contribution later auctioned by Phillips de Pury in New York.
His paintings are held in numerous public and private collections worldwide, and have drawn the attention of collectors and curators such as Primo Marella, who has been a consistent advocate of his work.
Peter Eastman will present his first solo exhibition in Germany with Suburbia Contemporary in May 2025, at the gallery’s Leipzig space.

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Viewing

Weekday Viewing 9am – 5pm

Saturday 14 & 21 and Sunday 15 February 10am – 4pm