Peter Coffin

Peter Coffin was born in 1972 in Berkeley, California. He earned a BA and BS from the University of California, Davis in 1995, followed by an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2000. He lives and works in New York City.

Coffin's practice spans sculpture, installation, video, sound, photography, assemblage, performance, and painted walls, often taking nature, science, pseudo-science, and everyday urban happenstance as starting points. His public projects include Untitled (Sculpture Silhouettes), a 2009 commission for City Hall Park in New York presented by the Public Art Fund, and Untitled (Tree Pants), a permanent installation at the Wanås Foundation Sculpture Park in Sweden made in collaboration with Levi Strauss & Co., in which denim was tailored to fit trees.

His exhibition history includes solo presentations at the Barbican Centre in London, the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, Crédac in Ivry-sur-Seine, and a 2013 to 2014 solo exhibition, Peter Coffin: Here & There, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. In 2009 he held the Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence position at the Aspen Art Museum. According to the most recent available biographical listings, he is represented by Herald St in London and Haydon Boss in San Francisco.

Institutional writing on Coffin consistently frames him through the range and playfulness of his practice rather than through a single signature medium. The Hirshhorn's curatorial text for his 2013 to 2014 exhibition described an unpredictable and eclectic body of work that often carries a sense of joy and humor, with departure points running from nature and pseudo-science to psychological displacement and urban happenstance, but with a constant undercurrent of exuberant subversiveness. The critical picture that emerges is of an artist read primarily through museum and biennial-adjacent contexts rather than through auction results.

Coffin's auction market is thin. According to available auction summaries, realized prices for his work have ranged from about USD 100 to USD 182,500, depending on the size and medium of the piece. His auction high is Pirate, which sold for USD 182,500 at Christie's New York in 2012, a figure that has stood as his record since. No dossier source identifies a more recent or higher sale.

Coffin's market is defined by scarcity and range rather than by a smooth price trend: auction results span from roughly USD 100 to just over USD 182,500, and the small number of public sales means any single result should be read with caution rather than as a market trend. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and attribution should be confirmed through the artist's studio or his current representing galleries. His strongest asset for a collector is the breadth of his museum collection history, spanning MoMA, the Guggenheim, LACMA, the Hirshhorn, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which points to durable institutional interest even where auction liquidity remains limited.