Growing up on a street with a view of Alcatraz seems to have instilled a preoccupation with matters of justice in Peter Saul, whose caustic paintings have skewered humanity for its pieties, hypocrisies, and abuses of power for over half a century. Tentacular in their critiques, Saul’s lurid, cartoony compositions present the vast majority of human endeavors as self-indulgent or at least fatally flawed. His first retrospective in Europe features around sixty paintings, ranging from his early expresisonistic depictions of refrigerators bursting with consumerist chaos to his epic Vietnam War-themed canvases to pictures dealing with more recent atrocities, such as the torture at Abu Ghraib.
