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."
Probing, 1985. Painting
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.
