"I am consumed by the subtle magic that occurs when playing with light, color, and movement... There is a trick of the eye where color seems to occupy space—a void—at once ethereal, yet seen from another angle the whole appears as if a ghostly image."
— Peter Combe
Peter Combe is a Canadian-British contemporary artist based in San Francisco, widely recognized for his innovative three-dimensional installations made from an unexpected everyday material: household paint swatches.
By hand-punching thousands of circular color chips and inserting them at precise 45-degree angles into grooved archival boards, Combe bridges the gap between painting, sculpture, and digital pointillism. The resulting works are highly architectural and entirely kinetic; as ambient light changes and viewers move across the room, the overlapping paper scales shift from abstract fields of color into crisp, three-dimensional photographic portraits.
Combe’s work has been exhibited internationally in New York, San Francisco, London, Paris, and Tel Aviv. His pieces are held in numerous high-profile private and public collections, including the Crocker Art Museum, the Microsoft Art Collection, and the Starbucks Corporation.