This commanding fine art piece sets a high-end conceptual standard, establishing itself as a premier of contemporary surrealist painting that seamlessly translates psychological thresholds into a visceral, dreamlike visual reality. Expertly hand-painted on premium heavy canvas, the celebrated New York artist David Humphrey strips away standard pastoral settings to build a raw dreamscape charged with symbolic depth. The layout tracks a beautiful structural tension between a dark, triangular geometric baseline and a massive, floating biomorphic mineral boulder from which two finger-like shapes mysteriously probe backward. The surrounding spatial field is anchored by two ghostly, classical male profiles floating on opposite sides, wrapped in an intense atmospheric sky of deep cerulean blues and soft ocher cloud formations. By turning a psychological transition into a profound study of raw emotion and the subconscious mind.
His compositions often feature human figures, animals and objects interwoven into abstract passages to create complex narratives that reckon with the dynamics of human relationships, gender, the environment and race, all while resisting any one interpretation."David Humphrey is an American painter, art critic, and sculptor associated with the postmodern turn in painting that began in the late 1970s. He is best known for his playful, cartoonish, puzzling paintings, which blend figuration and abstraction and create "allegories" about the medium of painting itself."
Introduce an intellectually complex, dramatic, and visually arresting masterwork into your private collection; securely purchase this original contemporary surrealist painting by David Humphrey online.
Contemporary Surrealist Painting - Probing, 1985. By David Humphrey
David Humphrey
Probing, 1985
Oil on Canvas
Dimensions:
Image size: 66 H x 88 W in.
Frame size: 67 H x 89 W x 1 D in.
Unique
Signed by the artist
Though his paintings, works on paper, and sculptures defy categorization, David Humphrey emerged as an artist in the late 1970s along with Postmodernism, an approach that continues to inform his heterogeneous compositions, visual pastiches that, in his words, “erase the breaks” between divergent styles. As he explains: “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship—the psychology of bonding, lovemaking, attachment, and so on—has kept me interested for a long time. I come back to it as a way to thicken the grammar of picture making.” In his paintings, this grammar includes gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His vibrant compositions feature human figures, narrative vignettes, animals, and objects interwoven into abstract passages. They read as sexually and psychologically charged dreamscapes, through which Humphrey breaks down boundaries to explore our relationships with each other and the world.
