The Mirror Stage: Michael David
"David brings his full self to the stage in The Mirror Stage, and in doing so fully expresses his personal credo: “If we see ourselves as damaged, we see ourselves as human. The object is complete when viewers see themselves in it.”
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.
New paintings by Astrid Dick, born 1972, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, are also included in the exhibition. Michael David and Astrid Dick have shared a studio in Tivoli, New York at the Judy Pfaff Compound for six months over the last year. Importantly, they share a passion for painting and a love of modernism with a corresponding desire to recontextualize it. Their work pays homage but simultaneously seeks to deconstruct modernist tropes through a contemporary lense of combing the ”high” and the “low,” the earnest with the self-defacing, the rigor with the playful, either formally, conceptually and/or in their use of materials, and through the strength found in the acceptance of our fractured and complex times in the search for a personal singular voice.
