Peter Alexander was born in Los Angeles and initially studied architecture with Louis Kahn at University of Pennsylvania prior to earning a BFA and MFA in art at UCLA where he studied with Richard Diebenkorn. It was during his time at UCLA in the mid-1960s that he stumbled across what would become one of his signature media: resin. A Californian through and through, Alexander loved surfing. While waxing his surfboard, he noticed how the resin dried up in the Dixie cup and was transfixed by its artistic potential.

Alexander worked consistently with resin until the early 1970s and, alongside Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, and others, helped bring the Light and Space movement to the world’s attention. He became one of the key figures of the movement and focused primarily on color, light and their intersection. His translucent, sleek, and luminous resin sculptures were unique to Minimalism in that they were aesthetically more approachable than other mediums. Alexander was forced to stop working in resin in 1972 due to its toxicity and instead shifted to painting and drawing, using found materials such as taffeta, velvet, and rhinestones to continue his exploration of light. He would later return to sculpture around the turn of the century, employing urethane and then acrylic, both less toxic than resin and more effective at displaying color.

Alexander's work was exhibited widely during his lifetime and experienced a resurgence of interest in the 21st century after being featured in Los Angeles 1955–1985 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006 and the 2011 exhibition Crosscurrents in L.A. Painting and Sculpture, 1950–1970 at the Getty Museum. His creations can be found in many important private and public collections, including Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.