Peter Campus, a pioneering video artist, has a new exhibition at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. The show features his early work, including the intense 1978 video 'Head of a Man with Death on His Mind,' alongside his recent 'philips quartet' (2023–24), a series of four landscape videos from his home on Long Island. The exhibition highlights his career-long themes of self-reflection, time, and mortality.
The exhibition, organized by curator John G. Handhart, provides a synthesis of Campus's 50-year oeuvre and underscores his enduring influence as a first-generation video artist. At 88, his new works demonstrate a shift from the ego-driven experiments of his youth to a profound, self-effacing humility, contemplating nature and the passage of time. This retrospective is significant for examining the legacy of early video art and the artistic evolution of a key figure in the medium.