Michael David (painter)
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Michael David Singer | |
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Abstract Expressionism |
Michael David, born Michael David Singer; born September 22, 1954, is an American painter. Born in Reno, Nevada, David's family relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where he was raised. He attended
Plasmatics and late-1970s New York music scene
In 1976 David, erotic photographer
In 1977, The Numbers were approached by impresario Rod Swenson, who was seeking musicians to form a backing band for singer Wendy O. Williams, whose radical persona he sought to exploit as punk music and performance art. The Numbers became The Plasmatics but the attention David began to gain as an important voice in the art world caused him to leave the band to pursue his burgeoning painting career.[1]
Painting career
David's first one-man show was in 1981 at the historic Sidney Janis Gallery. That year he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, at the time the youngest artist ever to do so, and in 1982 was awarded an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize. He went on to exhibit at galleries worldwide and was represented by Knoedler & Co. for the next 25 years.
David is best known for using the encaustic technique of painting, which uses pigment combined with heated beeswax. David built his early career on abstraction and religious iconography, which formed the bulk of his output until 1999. Since then he has also experimented with representational painting and traditional photography.
In 2000, he developed the "Chortens" and "Populations" series, about which prominent art historian and critic Donald Kuspit writes: "They are enigmatic works, all the more so because of the way their innumerable details form singularly monumental, intimidating wholes. Dense yet delicate, awesome yet intimate, they convey the fragility as well as grandeur of sheer being. Layer upon layer of paint piles up like layer upon layer of coral, but the textural result is more epic, not to say startling, than any coral island, and virtually any other existing abstract expressionist painting (upon which they are stylistically founded)."[2]
In 2001, David developed bi-lateral
Photography
In 1993, David experimented at the "20x24" Polaroid studio in Manhattan, which resulted in a series of portraits of playwright
Environmental sculpture - The Greenhouse Project
In 2002, David began to develop The Greenhouse Project, an evolving "architectural construct" based on historical American
Critical response
David's work was reviewed in Artforum and Art in America, and is considered one of the last links to the New York School of painting. Art historian Donald Kuspit characterized David’s paintings in the following essay;
"Michael David’s abstract paintings renew immediacy, indeed, reconstitute, strengthen, and even apotheosize it. They raise it to a feverishly fresh intensity with their remarkable touch, indicating they are among the very best painterly abstractions made. To me they make it transparently clear that immediacy may be an illusion to the intellect but it is not one for the senses—for touch and sight, mingled together inextricably in ecstatic perception. For them, painterly immediacy is ultimate reality: pure sensuous intensity transcendent of ordinary, habitual understanding of the world, which is mediated by socially sanctioned language and banal meanings that force sense experience into their procrustean bed.
David may be the most innovative master of immediate surface since the
Notes
- ^ "Michael David: A Life in Encaustic - Vasari21". 20 August 2017.
- ^ Donald Kuspit, Immediacy Redivivus: Michael David New Works 2002-2004, 2004
- ^ "About Michael David, Michael David Art & Paintings, Michael David Exhibits & Exhibitions". Archived from the original on 2017-06-10. Retrieved 2009-10-27.
- ^ Donald Kuspit, Immediacy Redivivus: Michael David New Works 2002-2004, 2004