David Row: Night and Day
Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
December 1, 2023 – January 26, 2024
Untitled (Gold II), 2022
Oil on linen on panel, 14 x 26 inches
© David Row / Courtesy Locks Gallery
Untitled (Earth Gray), 2022
Oil on linen on panel, 15 x 26 inches
© David Row / Courtesy Locks Gallery
Locks Gallery presents Night and Day, an exhibition of small-scale shaped paintings by DAVID ROW spanning from 2017 to the present.
David Row’s quartz-like paintings transform the seemingly solid, two-dimensional surface of each wood panel into an expansive, multi-perspectival space. Using hard-angle edges and intersecting lines, these image-forms destabilize the illusion of a unified shape and combine opposing tendencies, such as rectilinear and curvilinear or positive and negative spaces. As described by artist and art critic Colin Edgington, these paintings are “heavy and light, solid and liquid, mutable and multiple. Luminous layers of paint are scraped and incised to reveal underlying dimensions of color, hinting towards infinite planes beyond the surface.”
In some pieces, vibrant, neon colors radiate light from the edges, causing the painting to pulse and vibrate as if emitting energy. Other paintings on linen stretched over panel feature more lustrous, metallic sheens that reflect and glimmer, changing color when viewed from different angles. The fluorescent and metallic pigments also bounce light around the periphery of the shapes to create an incandescent glow, evoking the changing sensation of vision at dawn or dusk.
DAVID ROW (b. 1949, Portland, ME) grew up outside of New Haven, CT and now lives and works between Maine and New York City. He received his BFA from Yale in 1972 and, after a year studying Indian music in Calcutta, returned there to complete his MFA. Since the 1980s, he has been in dialogue with the trajectory of abstract painting in New York, including artists such as Frank Stella and Robert Mangold. His works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including The Brooklyn Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego among others. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, in New York, in May 2008.
LOCKS GALLERY
600 Washington Square South, Philadelphia, PA 19106
