room for painting 05 - Michael David: field paintings

For the fifth exhibition in the room for painting I am excited to introduce San Francisco audiences to the exceptional work of Michael David, Professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department of the Art Institute of Boston. David’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the... Read more

For the fifth exhibition in the room for painting I am excited to introduce San Francisco audiences to the exceptional work of Michael David, Professor and Chair of the Fine Arts Department of the Art Institute of Boston. David’s work is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Fogg Art Museum and the Museum of the City of New York. He studied with Philip Guston and Vija Celmins. For this series, David plays with the word field and its many art historical associations. While his image may be a faithfully rendered field of grass, it is also a monochromatic field of color with the articulated marking of radical painting. David improvises, starting with sweeping gestures that slowly focus and find their identity as composition and form. His achievement is a high synthesis of the abstract, the figurative, and the concrete.