Michael Davis “Reanimating II”
William Holman Gallery
This event has ended.
William Holman Gallery presents a solo exhibition of paintings and drawings by Michael J. Davis. While Davis’s subjects are recognizable in a casual way, upon sustained viewing the works fluctuate; his figures appearing to simultaneously emerge and recede into their medium. Davis’s work destabilizes boundaries between subject matter and medium, composition and decomposition, life and death.
In Sticky Subjects: Michael Davis’s Post-Abstract Abstraction, Ellen Levy, author and visiting professor at The Pratt Institute, writes:
His drawings and paintings are sites of persistent struggle between three-dimensional subjects and two-dimensional space. The result is a kind of post-abstract abstraction, where depth and flatness, intense emotion and the purest formalism, attain to a kind of inconsistent consistency.
Reanimating II brings together a dozen and a half charcoal drawings and oil paintings, many featuring Davis’s signature subject matter, self-portraits and depictions of cats. Regarding the subject matter, Levy explains:
Davis has labored toconstruct a private detour …by which to smuggle in the uncool media and lost intimacies to which he remains stubbornly, melancholically attached. The chief danger he runs on the way is falling into sentimentality. And, given that, what more dangerous model could he choose than the cat, always a sticky subject, and now the universal meme for the pornography of the emotions? The lol-cats, though, like all pornographic models, are pure projections: the emotions they conjure are the viewer’s alone. Davis’s cats, by contrast, possess subjectivity, but of a kind that must remain inaccessible to us. Rolling, grooming, or crouching with the same intense concentration that Davis brings to the touch and touch and touch of the crayon, they are absorptive figures, like Vermeer’s women, only more perfectly sealed-off.
“I search,” Davis said, “for a way to give my subjects a space that feels like I’ve liberated them from three-dimensional restraints and gained for them a freedom that can only exist in a two-dimensional world. Searching for a way to achieve this ambiguous place is a big part of my struggle to resolve a piece.”
Michael Davis graduated from Princeton University in 1979. His work has been exhibited at museums and galleries including P.S. 1, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Clocktower Gallery, the New York City Gallery, and the National Academy of Design. Davisʼs paintings - including commissioned portraits - are in private collections in the U.S. and Europe. His work was included by The Museum of Modern Art in the 2000 Kwangju (South Korea) Bienniale. He has taught drawing and painting at Brooklyn College, Parsons School of Design and the 92nd Street Y, and taught as a visiting artist at the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University. Davis’s work has been reviewed positively in journals and newspapers including Art Forum, Art News, Art in America, The New Yorker, the New York Times and others.
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Schedule
from October 03, 2013 to November 02, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-10-03 from 18:00 to 20:00