In My Own Words: Michael David : The Mirror Stage: An Introduction

5 - 24 October 2023
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  • The Mirror Stage: An INtroduction In his latest series Michael David returns to the themes and essence of his breakthrough...
    Vanitas (For Frank Auerbach), 2023 | Mirror, silicone, resin, and oil on birch plywood | 62.5 x 62.5 in
    The Mirror Stage: An INtroduction

    In his latest series Michael David returns to the themes and essence of his breakthrough symbol paintings shown at the legendary Sidney Janis Gallery in 1981. As if shattering the quantum fields of Pollock, the way Pollock shattered the innovation of Cézanne, David redefines the use of surface and action "painting" with personal narratives that also speak to the complexity of our contemporary lives.


    In this new body of work, David builds his paintings with hundreds of pounds of broken mirror.  In doing so, he achieves a complex yet seamless synthesis of his work from over the last four decades.  By pushing the boundaries between painting and sculpture, David embeds a singular narrative, as evidenced in his early shaped symbol paintings that used the Cross, the Swastika, the Five Point Jewish Star, to his more recent master works such as The Inevitable andThe End of the World As We Know It.

     

    In these mirror paintings, David has pushed the language of abstraction into the most contemporary of voices.  In their materiality, conception and process, these works conjure his punk roots as bass player for the Numbers - a fixture in New York's early punk rock along pioneers such as the Ramones and Blondie - and then the Plasmatics – which he left to focus solely on painting – and his deep love of popular culture, to be in radical dialog with the history of abstraction and contemporary abstract painting.   In their impossible mix of bling-bling ambiguity, almost fatal attraction, harsh urbanity, and jewel-like bewitchedness, the mirror paintings carve themselves a place in the midst of current abstraction, from the irreverence of street art and the enchantment of Chris Martin’s glitter paintings, all the way to the slickness and monumentality of Gerhard Richter’s grey mirror panels. 

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  • MICHAEL DAVID: IN MY OWN WORDS 'In my three most recent works, where I introduce black mirror, thereby extending the...
    Black Vanitas (For Jean-Michel Basquiat), 2023 | Tar, resin, oil, and mirror on birch plywood | 76 x 72 in

    MICHAEL DAVID: IN MY OWN WORDS

    "In my three most recent works, where I introduce black mirror, thereby extending the material I used in my last exhibition “The Mirror Stage'', I pay homage to three artists I love; Frank Auerbach, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Nina Simone, whose lives have moved me and whose work has inspired me. Following a centuries-old tradition of the use of the skull, my painting Vanitas (For Frank Auerbach) references a horizontal skull that Auerbach painted based on a painting by his dear friend Leon Kosoff.

     

    My painting Black Vanitas (In This Case for Jean-Michel Basquiat), where I use black mirror for the first time, speaks to me of Basquiat’s portrait and of his iconic use of the skull as filtered through his experience of exploitation and racism in the art world.  Certainly, my use of black mirror was not incidental. I painted The Black Rose (For Nina Simone) on an actual semi-grand piano top with black mirror and a single strike, suggesting simultaneously a tragic flower and a kiss.

     

     

  • Quoting the late curator Klaus Kertess, “Art is a platform for experience, not a lesson.  What is being proposed here is not a return to formalism but an art in which meaning is embedded in formal value.  An acknowledgement of sensuousness is indispensable – whether as play or sheer joy or the kind of subversity that has us reaching for a rose and grabbing a thorn.”
  • MIchael David, (B. 1954 Reno, Nevada)
    The Black Rose (For Nina Simone), 2023 | Obsidian and silicone on piano lid | 64 x 61 in

    MIchael David

    (B. 1954 Reno, Nevada)
    Guggenheim Fellow, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, Yaddo and Edward Albee Fellow, Michael David has been exhibiting internationally since 1981, first with the historical Sidney Janis Gallery, and then with M. Knoedler & Co., as well as Kasim Gallery in London, and has been represented by Johnson Lowe Gallery (Formerly, Bill Lowe Gallery) in Atlanta for two decades. His work has been shown widely throughout the United States for over 40 years. He has been the subject of much historical and curatorial acclaim, and his exhibitions have been reviewed in Art Forum and Art in America, among many other publications.


    His work is included in many prominent private collections and the permanent public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, The Brooklyn Museum, The Jewish Museum in New York, The Houston Museum of Contemporary Art, the Denver Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Margulies Collection in Miami and the Edward Albee Foundation in Montauk New York, and has been the subject of a one-person exhibition at Aspen Museum of Art.