Peter Agostini

From New York City, Agostini is a self-taught sculptor who spent a year at the Leonardo da Vinci School of Art in New York City. His early work was influenced by Elie Nadelman and Alberto Giacometti, but by the 1950s, he had his own distinct style which was humorous and surrealistic in which he molded found objects, often quite large, in plaster. Many of his works suggested turbulent themes such as hurricanes and action horses and riders, and he also explored the everyday world with "frozen life" pieces such as clotheslines, pillows, and squeezed inner tubes. In the 1970s, he turned to figure pieces in clay and also did watercolors and monoprints. Agostini taught at the University of North Carolina for almost twenty years and at the New York Studio School and received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1964.

Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Cleveland Museum of Fine Arts, Cleveland, OH
Hirshborn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Museum, Washington, DC
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Museum of Modern Art, New York
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN
The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Union Carbide The University of North Carolina, Greensboro The University of Southern California, Los Angeles