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David Humphrey emerged as an artist in the 1970s along with Postmodernism. The grammar in his paintings include gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His vibrant compositions feature human figures, narrative vignettes, animals, and objects interwoven into abstract passages. They read as sexually and psychologically charged dreamscapes, through which Humphrey breaks down boundaries to explore our relationships with each other and the world. As he explains: “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship - the psychology of bonding, lovemaking, attachment, and so on - has kept me interested for a long time. I come back to it as a way to thicken the grammar of picture making.”
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"Attached to my invitation to do the Freund Visiting Artist Lecture at Washington University in St. Louis was another invitation to make monoprints with Island Press, which is nested within that school. My plan was to compress the process into one day in which I would paint onto plates to be printed onto digital images I sent in advance. The images were snapshots of streets in my industrial neighborhood that I could augment, vandalize and project into with the improvisatory mark-making that monoprinting is so good at capturing."
--David Humphrey, 2020
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Gravity's Deposit
Monoprints, 2019, printed at Island Press -
DAVID HUMPHREY MAKES A GESTURE ON THE MONOPRINT "STREET WORK" AT ISLAND PRESS, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS
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David Humphrey
Broken Bags, 2019"Sidewalks and streets are an ever-changing ground for painting-like marks, spills, and assemblage. Gravity holds everything in place as we move over it on foot or in a vehicle. When the seen thing becomes a printed photograph, one has time to linger on all the details presumably seen but sensibly forgotten because our brain would explode. But in a painting, it is rewarding to care about each and every detail, and to care again and again. Painting on enlarged snapshots was a way for me to re-inhabit a recently exited past with the ability to project back into it or to conjure things and beings from it. Each painting emerged from a series of improvisations or gestures. Sometimes squeezing a tube of paint onto the print and pushing it around was enough to establish contact with the photograph’s weird otherness. The oscillating process of damage and repair gives the work, hopefully, an ambivalent hum."
--David Humphrey, 2020
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Humphrey’s paintings, sculptures and drawings have been known for their "surreal sexiness, postmodern snap, and painterly discrimination". Figuration and landscape are combined with abstract forms, and diverse painting practices co-exist to hatch implied but ultimately incomprehensible narratives. "There’s piquant visual humor in all of Humphrey’s paintings, but it serves as a sociological or psychological (and frequently sexually- or racially-tinged) hook rather than a smarmy snare-drum punch line, to jump-start deeper inquiry. With clear intent and laserlike focus, Humphrey does precisely what a painter ought to do: he makes you look hard and keeps you thinking even harder.” Jonathan Stevenson, Two Coats of Paint.
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Available Works
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David Humphrey: Gravity's Deposit
Past viewing_room
