Bill Lowe Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by New York artist Michael David titled The Mirror Stage.
In his latest series, 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, including A Day In The Life (titled after The Beatles’ masterpiece from Sargent Pepper) and Vanitas (The Man Who Fell to Earth II) (after the 1976 film by Nicolas Roeg starring David Bowie), David builds his paintings with hundreds of pounds of broken mirror. In doing so, he achieves a complex yet seamless synthesis of his work 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, and the Five Point Jewish Star, to his more recent masterworks such as The Inevitable and End of the World As We Know It.
In his essay, Introspection, Disruption, Discovery: Michael David’s The Mirror Stage, Paul D’Agostino writes, “What David has embraced and internalized primarily, perhaps, and now externalized rather more openly than ever, are his multifarious sources of inspiration – many of them not strictly art-related – and a deeply self-reflective sense of urgency and vulnerability. As an artist of a certain generation who cut his creative teeth and amalgamated his aesthetics during a certain era, and within a certain artistic milieu, of particularly lasting impact on cultural production in New York City – namely the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s – David found himself heavily influenced by Abstract Expressionism, chiefly, but also by Pop Art, street art, Beat poetry, cinema, and not least, rock and roll, especially punk rock.
”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 a bass player for the Numbers - a fixture in New York's early punk rock scene, along with pioneers such as the Ramones and Blondie - as well as the Plasmatics – which he left to focus solely on painting. When coupled with David’s deep love of popular culture, this fusion situates these works in radical dialogue 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 wickedness, the mirror paintings carve themselves a place amid 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.
The revolution and brilliance of the mirror paintings is that the bond shared between the artist and viewer is taken to its most fundamental state, both primal and extreme, where that experience is actualized – as opposed to being solely theoretically or intellectually imbued in traditional viewing – by one's own reflection. Constructed with shattered mirrors, the viewer's reflection both figuratively and literally completes these painting, as each of us is confronted with our own image and life, as well as our collective place in these uncertain times. Violent yet fragile, dangerous yet compassionate, these works possess an elegant yet terrible beauty that is ever-changing not only with the light, but also with each viewer’s reflection. In their fragmented reflection, the viewer becomes one with the work, thereby fulfilling the promise of David's "seeking " as stated in Kuspit's essay. In these paintings, David looks back on his own life and finds compassion in the ever-changing light of his reconstituted self, and in doing so, shares with us a place of contemplation and beauty for all.
