David Humphrey

David Humphrey

Ass Backwards

March 2 through 25, 2023

Opening Reception: March 2 from 6 to 8pm

Fredericks & Freiser is pleased to announce Ass Backwards, an exhibition of new work by David Humphrey. The exhibition continues Humphrey’s forty-year commitment to making formally inventive, psycho-socially engaged paintings and sculpture.

Humphrey’s new paintings and sculpture celebrate the mixing up of directions, the movement forward seen backwards. Aren’t asses already backwards? Asses add humor, but the butt of a joke is not always appreciated by its receiving end. Paintings are sometimes funny, and artists frequently develop their work in counterintuitive and amusingly inefficient ways. These new paintings sometimes picture a person’s backside, but all of them situate their protagonists in mutating spaces that turn front to back and back to front - cart before the horse - tail wagging the dog - ass backwards into the future.

Ass Backwards will be Humphrey’s sixth exhibition with Fredericks & Freiser. It marks a further development in the artist’s method of developing images from the public realm into imaginative hybrids that combine the social with the eccentrically individual; the historically referential with the vividly contemporary, that he has been creating since his first show at McKee Gallery in 1984. In the five decades since, Humphrey’s work has engaged with and contributed to the language of contemporary art: postmodernism, post- postmodernism, and the aporia of hyper-pluralism.

About the Artist

David Humphrey (b. 1955) has been the subject of 44 solo exhibitions including McKee Gallery, NY; Sikkema Jenkins, NY; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is in numerous public collections including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Saatchi Gallery, London. He is currently teaching in the MFA program of Columbia. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2008.

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Ass Backwards

March 2 – 25, 2023

Press Release