David Mann – Echoes’ Resonance

Margaret Thatcher Projects is pleased to present an exhibition of new oil paintings by David Mann, the artist’s third solo show at the gallery. David Mann’s luminous paintings suggest atmospheric spaces that exist between abstraction and representation. While his past work resembled unfolding cosmic or microscopic events, Mann is now focused on the impact of light and color within the natural world. In particular this exhibition embodies the artist’s emotional response to landscape. His horizontal canvases imply vistas and portals, but instead of depicting nature they contain mysterious voids glowing with otherworldly light.

Mann achieves remarkable depth and radiance through evocative color selection and translucent layering of paint. In one canvas vivid orange light billows out from the center into yellow, blue and pink glazes as if scattered by an imperfect prism. Other paintings are predominately monochromatic with fluorescent green, turquoise, or pink veils overlapping rich layers of underpainting. In contrast to the suffused synthetic hues, distinct vertical lines run across each canvas. These parallel linear elements define solid edges and planes that act as architectural, mathematical or rhythmic counterpoints to the diaphanous films of color.

For Mann, painting can investigate overwhelming and incomprehensible properties of the universe. By combining geometric marks with flowing chromatic passages, he evokes the balance found in nature between structural and formless phenomena.

Mann writes of his work:
I interrogate the lucid and enigmatic, and how the materiality of paint can create possibilities without endings­ – a very real sense of truth. Color, light and concepts of time inform my current explorations. I’m curious about the contrasts between the physical and the metaphysical. I attempt to emphasize the materiality of painting while suggesting the ineffable in this body of work.

David Mann is an American artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. His paintings have been exhibited throughout the United States and Canada, including solo museum exhibitions at the Flaten Art Museum, Northfield, MN, and the National Academy of Sciences, Washington, DC. In 2000, the artist was awarded a Pollock Krasner Foundation Award. His paintings are in several public and corporate collections including The Albright- Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, and The Eli and Edyth Broad Museum at Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI. Reviews of Mann’s work have been published in The New York Times, Art in America, TimeOut NY and The Brooklyn Rail, among others.

Gallery hours Tue-Sat 11 am – 6 pm, and by appointment

Exhibition Duration 30 April – 04 June 2022

www.thatcherprojects.com

Location:
Margaret Thatcher Projects
539 West 23rd Street
10011 New York, NY
United States