April 2019-May 2019

RECENT WORK
My current artwork encompasses painting, collage, digital creation and prints.

DARK CURVATURE

My visual vocabulary is informed by my mathematics background. Many of my artworks are created by repetition, transformation and iteration of primitive elements. These are fundamental processes in some areas of mathematics.

The inspiration for my “Dark Curvature” paintings originated in 2017, when I viewed a demonstration of James Austin Murray’s black paintings. This inspired me to begin my own exploration of the potential to produce abstract, geometrical textured paintings using only one color; namely black.

There have been many other inspirations, including the photographs of Hiroshi Sugimoto, and the work of 20th Century Russian artist Kasimir Malevich. In this show, there are paintings on canvas and on rag paper, and also paint monoprints on paper.

FUCKING FRAGILE

The Fucking Fragile series consists of limited edition prints. The series originated in 2017, when I started thinking about the evolution of the word “fucking” which, in everyday language is now often used as a more emphatic, more colorful replacement for “very” or “extremely”. The versatility of the word led to my first playful designs in the series, such as “Free Fucking Gift” and “Fucking Fragile”.

In the latter part of 2018, and into 2019, my new work in the series gradually evolved into implicit statements about the unease that seems to pervade our lives, and also as metaphors for the current social/political environment. For me, many of the artworks in the “Fucking Fragile” series can be interpreted as cautionary statements about the fragility of our democracy, the fragility of our complex economic structure, and the existential dangers that seem to be proliferating.

FIND ME ONLINE: www.davidvonmetz.com metzimage@gmail.com