Peter Dušek is a Canadian artist and gallerist whose reductionist and experimental practice challenges and reimagines photography. Guided by the principle “as little as possible, as much as necessary,” he methodically subtracts from the excess of the visible world—eliminating detail, compressing space, and often overlaying his own colour—until only a taut, resonant essence remains.

Reduction is revelation: long exposures dissolve time, overexposure inverts reality, and spatial compression collapses landscapes into near-abstract planes. The resulting images occupy an ambiguous territory—neither photographs nor paintings, yet borrowing from both. They retain the referential trace of light striking a sensor while dissolving into painterly fields of tone, colour, and gesture.

Firmly rooted in the photographic act yet echoing the simplicity of Zen, the durational precision of Sugimoto, the geometric rigour of Mondrian, the emotive colour of Rothko, and the energy of Pollock, his work carries a distinctly Canadian sense of terrains both vast and intimately close.

Presented in galleries and shared internationally, Dušek’s images stand against the saturation of digital noise, reminding us that true power lies not in addition, but in the bold courage to subtract.