Michael David
Abstract painter Michael David is best known for his use of Encaustic, which incorporates pigment with heated beeswax.
He discovered Encaustic while studying at Parsons School of Design in New York in 1975; David says of the medium, “I loved the immediacy of the process, the physicality, and how I was able to embed objects and create narrative in abstraction. I felt it was a perfect actualization of myself through painting.”
Considered an inheritor of Abstract Expressionism, David’s abstract work primarily centers on the use of a densely layered surface to facilitate a direct and immediate spiritual experience.
Explanatory text with painting shown in gallery and website:
Requium for a Gangster – 2006
Requium for a Gangster is an outstanding work revolving around the memorial procession of mobsters that are often lead by a sanitation vehicle with a wreath or roses. It echoes the malleable quality of our memory – our minds/spirits – what makes them most vulnerable and most powerful.
Michael David is akin to the works of Keifer and Mark Bradford. His focus on those elements of the human experience that transcend the political, the contemporary but mine (in an archaeological sense) what makes us most human. His ability to access and explore these depths of humanity places him among the great artistic titans of our society.
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.