David Humphrey

David Humphrey makes formally inventive, psycho-socially engaged paintings. He transforms images from the public realm into imaginative hybrids of the social and eccentrically individual, the historic and vividly contemporary. His work celebrates the peculiar nesting within the familiar. Mixing various representational schema with improvisational abstraction, he tells stories of vexed intimacy, social reality, and imaginative projections crashing into the real.

Humphrey has said, “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship—the psychology of bonding, love- making, 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.” Gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism inform his work.

Humphrey (b. 1955) has been the subject of 44 solo exhibitions including McKee Gallery, NY; Sikkema Jenkins, NY, and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is represented in the permanent collections of The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, as well as the Saatchi Gallery, London. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2008. His book of selected art writing, Blind Handshake, was published in 2010, and a new monograph was recently published by Fredericks & Freiser, NY, who represents the artist.