Cleon Peterson (b. 1973) is an American artist whose stark, graphic paintings and prints depict a world of authoritarian violence, power, and the cycles of domination and submission that organise political and social life. Born in Seattle and trained at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he received his MFA, he has developed a visual language of extraordinary formal precision and immediate emotional impact — one that draws on the aesthetics of Greek pottery, political propaganda posters, and the graphic design tradition in which he spent years working professionally before his fine art career took hold.
His compositions are immediately recognisable: figures packed into dense, kinetic scenes of high-contrast conflict, the spare palette of black, white, red, and yellow giving each image the graphic authority of a sign system rather than the ambiguity of conventional painting. The violence depicted is explicit but never gratuitous — it is the violence of power exercised without accountability, of systems that perpetuate themselves through the suppression of those within them. Leon Golub and Paul McCarthy are among his acknowledged influences; the connection to Golub in particular — the American painter who spent decades depicting mercenaries, interrogators, and the apparatus of state violence — locates Peterson within a serious tradition of political figurative art.
In 2016 he created the first mural ever painted at the base of the Eiffel Tower — a commission that placed his visual argument about power and violence in the shadow of one of the world's most visited monuments. His work has fetched five-figure prices on the secondary market and has been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London, Paris, and San Francisco.
His Little Big Man series — Mueller/Trump and Putin/Trump variants in gold and red — and his It's Mine, Virgins (White), and Eclipse (Gold) editions are available through Creed Gallery, Ascot, for collectors across Berkshire, Surrey, and London.
