David Row: investigations

David Row: investigations

from May 9 until June 20, 2019

metroquadro, Corso San Maurizio 73/F, Torino

opening time Tue – Sat 4 pm – 7 pm

opening Thursday May 9 from 6:30 til 10 pm

metroquadro presents a solo show by David Row (Portland, 1949), an American artist known for his works on canvases with irregular shapes and intense colors.

On display is a series of recent works in oli on Arches paper, studies for the realization of larger canvases and tables, in which the artist continues his research on perception through shapes, spaces, irregular polygons, and ellipses, full of great energy but balanced by a balance and formal precision, in turn, fractured and fragmented by thin lines in vivid phosphorescent colors.

For Row, the intense and saturated colors tell of the period he lived as a teenager in India, which had so much influence on his chromatic sensitivity. A particular quality of light and color, forever associated with particular experiences and references.

In his composition David Row leaves parts of his recurring forms in his works – the ellipses and the large Xs – outside the irregular physical limits of the support, leaving the viewer’s eye the possibility of completing the missing parts, extending them beyond the perimeter and occupying the surrounding space, activating it and making it an integral part of the work.

They are frontal, two-dimensional works, which can also be read as spatial, adding a sculptural dimension, providing a further key to interpretation.

Row evokes a colorful geometry, made up of reality of solid certainties interrupted and fragmented by small, unexpected, and apparently random events, which bring into play a whole of which we are only allowed to see apart.

David Row(Portland, 1949), lives and works in New York. A student of Al Held, he graduated with honors from Yale University in 1972, where he earned a master’s degree in 1975. He then moved to New York, where he became a leading member of the then young generation of abstract artists such as Peter Halley, Ross Bleckner, and Mary Heilmann.

He was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting by the National Academy Museum, New York, in May 2008.

He has exhibited in countless solo and group exhibitions in leading American and international galleries. Lecturer in numerous institutions such as The Cooper Union, Rhode Island School of Design, Pratt Institute, Princeton University, Fordham University, he currently teaches at The School of Visual Arts in New York.

His works can be found, among others, in the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. The Portland Museum of Art has recently acquired one of his great works that will be placed at the entrance of the museum and the CMCA (Center for Maine Contemporary Art) in Rockland in 2020 will inaugurate, in its new building designed by Toshiko Mori, the first stop of a traveling exhibition to which he will dedicate the main exhibition space to the works of David Row.