David Humphrey

David Humphrey

New Paintings

November 28, 2012 through January 19, 2013

“The artist’s impulse control is almost nonexistent. He wants to grab everything and lick it, eat your lunch, breathe into your phone. Leave his germs everywhere and laugh too loudly. Hurt people with mean comments. Then nuzzle up to them and ask for love. He is so complicated. But so honest.”
Jennifer Coates, Thanks for Letting Me Look

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by David Humphrey. He paints imagined worlds where the boundaries between psychological interior, physical urges, and familiar settings fall away. Humphrey’s source images are often derived from the public realm, which he mutates, hybridizes and reframes into jarring and comic situations. Images posted on Facebook fold into classic mythology, advertising, art history and commercial entertainment to tell stories about the way individuals are woven into their world.

Humphrey combines a variety of painting vernaculars; abstraction, figuration, gestural expressionism and technological imaging comingle with automatist spills and drips. These operations are understood as modes of behavior that act as secondary characters in Humphrey’s twisted pictorial plots. To quote the artist, “(the work) engages innovation and tradition for their unstable capacities to purvey vitality, to create force-fields of memory and feeling in which thought-rhythms and narrative can describe what it feels like to be a person today.”

About the Artist

David Humphrey (b 1955) lives and works in New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the McKee Gallery, New York, Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami, and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is in many public collections including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He is a senior critic at the Yale School of Art and an anthology of his art writing, entitled Blind Handshake, was published in 2010. This is his first solo exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser.