Peter Sacks was born in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1950, and grew up in Durban, on the Indian Ocean. After a term in Medical School at the University of Cape Town, he decided to pursue Political Science and Literature at the University of Natal. He became involved in the struggle against the apartheid regime as a member of the National Union of South African Students and executive of the Students Representative Council. In 1970 Sacks emigrated from South Africa and spent the following several years studying in the United States and the United Kingdom. While authoring several books of literary scholarship and poetry, he painted privately, mostly in notebooks – several of which accompanied his travels on foot in South America, Asia, Africa and Europe. During the late 90’s he began to work on unframed canvas pages and, after a several month retreat in Marfa, Texas, began making free-standing works. Following the retreat, Sacks decided to make the works public and had his first solo exhibition in Paris in 2004, followed by exhibitions in New York and London. His large works on cardboard led to his designing sets for Peter Brook, notably the production of Sizwe Bansi is Dead at Theatre des Bouffes du Nord, Paris (2009). Sacks previously had solo shows at Robert Miller Gallery and Marlborough. In fall 2022, the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University presented Sacks’ first solo museum show, “Peter Sacks: Resistance,” featuring his series of portraits of historical and contemporary figures notable for resisting political, racial or cultural oppression over the past two centuries. His densely layered works are in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including Baltimore Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham, MA; The Collection of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, Johannesburg; The Ethelbert Cooper Museum of African and African American Art, Cambridge, MA; The Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, Oxford; and the Beyond Borders Foundation, Edinburgh. Sacks lives and works in Massachusetts. He has had solo exhibitions at Sperone Westwater in 2021, 2022 and 2024.

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