David Humphrey

Kate Werble Gallery is pleased to present David Humphrey’s Anecdote, an immersive and installation-based exhibition made of a single painting that covers the gallery’s walls, multiple drawings, and a single sculpture.

An anecdote is a short narrative that implies more than it says. It has an encapsulated coherence that encourages generalizing from its sharpened specificity. Scientists warn to not derive sweeping conclusions from anecdotes, even if an appetite for the concrete is hard to suppress. A drawing can sometimes be anecdotal in relation to its fancier siblings - painting and sculpture - but a doodle or spontaneous jotting should never be underestimated to unexpectedly reveal a new way of seeing or thinking.

For this exhibition, Humphrey paints the walls of the gallery to create a fictional space within which the works will be organized into smaller subgroups. They are pinned to the wall of a cartoon exterior or attached to a billboard out in the landscape. Humphrey’s drawings emerge from the ecology of his studio, where he combines image research from multiple sources, drawings from observation and improvisation and experiments with gesture and medium. His goal is to organize these disparate activities into single images that resonate with associative content and formal inventiveness.

Anecdote is presented in collaboration with Fredericks & Freiser.

David Humphrey has maintained a forty-year commitment to making imaginative psycho-socially engaged paintings. David Humphrey (USA, b. 1955) has been the subject of 44 solo exhibitions including McKee Gallery, NY; Sikkema Jenkins, NY; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is in the collections of several museums and public collections including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as well as the Saatchi Gallery, London. He is currently teaching in the MFA program of Columbia. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2008. Humphrey has had five solo exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser.