INHABITED TOUCH
March 18 – April 17, 2022
Opening Reception: March 18, 6-9 PM
I read it here in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming - limiting, warm.
-Rainer Maria Rilke (Book of Hours)
M.David & Co. is pleased to announce Inhabited Touch, an exhibition of paintings by Hannah Beerman, Damien Cabanes, Astrid Dick, Staver Klitgaard, Chris Martin, and Benjamin Pritchard.
Ranging in ages from 29 to 67, from New York to Paris, this exhibition reaffirms the belief in the continuity, strength, and relevancy of painting born and nourished by the intergenerational relationships among painters, as well as the sanctity of the handmade and the human touch in all of its variations.
The exhibition's title and concept were originally coined by painter Astrid Dick and further developed in our many conversations. At the heart of this exhibition is the search for meaning through process and materiality that is guided not by subject matter nor formal concerns, image nor visual effects, but by a conscious decision to "inhabit," to occupy. It is through this engagement that significance, narrative, and formal rigor are revealed. In this search, there is not one but multiple manifestations of this human touch – whether it be figurative or abstract, fast or slow, thick or thin, wildly gestural or reserved, aggressive or tender, in oil or acrylic, brushed or collaged – as an expression of what makes each of us different yet bound together by our universal desire to find meaning and voice in the transformative act of creativity.
The works of Hannah Beerman are fast and filled with humor and passion. Through the use of mixed media, they weave chaos and reason, inhabiting her generation's longing to make sense of a world that makes none.
Damien Cabanes, while new to many of us in New York but with a long and storied practice in Paris, paints furiously in the "one take," reducing and expanding the unmediated act of painting. Working from direct observation, painting is, for him, a ritual where touch transcends what may be observed in nature to reveal the nature of one itself.
Astrid Dick, born in Buenos Aires and based in Paris, works with a wild and robust range of colors and marks and a process reminiscent of that famous quote "Never play anything the same way twice" by jazz composer Miles Davis. Her patterning of stripes and webs, as well as her ability to work from the most intimate to grand scale with the same direct gestures, simultaneously creates a complex space of improvisation and organization held together through her love of paint itself and her undying belief in painting.
Staver Klitgaard, 21st century Fauve and second-generation painter, paints nightmares, dreams, and the psyche with a direct current from head to hand. Vulgar, wild, punk, funny, and vulnerable all at once, Staver's hand moves, attacks, and caresses without filter, inhabited by the unending search to define what is felt and not spoken.
Chris Martin has been one of the most influential voices in contemporary painting since the 1980s as one of the founders of the "Williamsburg scene." Combining a large scale that recalls the heroism of Abstract expressionist painting and the use of unconventional materials such as glitter, imagery referencing popular culture, and his love for direct expression as found in the work of Southern Vernacular artists, Martin reinvents and expands the language of painting with modesty, intimacy, joy, and grace.
Benjamin Pritchard has been a painter's painter for the last two decades. Working and reworking paintings over and over on multiple formats, he is a traveler searching for that authentic moment where his love of material and the act of painting is transformed into one final move which simultaneously reveals self and releases ego.
In this exhibition, no two paintings, formats, or media are alike. Each artist's immersion in an open-ended search for meaning and content creates a particularly rich architecture for the viewer to inhabit the artist's work and find their own experience within it.
Michael David - Painter/Curator/Educator
2-18-22
Download PDF:
Press Release
Photos by Paul Takeuchi
James Kalm report on Inhabited Touch