ENRICO DAVID

17 Sep-16 Nov 2013

Overview

Michael Werner Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new works by Enrico David. This is the artist's second exhibition with Michael Werner Gallery and his first exhibition in London since the Turner Prize in 2009. Enrico David's contemporary surrealism challenges our reliance on language and its attendant need for reasoned apprehension. David's practice deftly employs a range of materials and techniques - painting, sculpture and various other traditions of handicraft, always rooted in drawing - to make tangible a body in perpetual metamorphosis. The disembodied personae populating the artist's oeuvre exist in an unsettling state of liminality, emerging with reluctance and uncertainty: heads protrude inappropriately from constructions resembling furniture, limbs extend into ornamentation, bodies dissolve into abstraction. Anthropomorphism is the leitmotif of David's work. His incongruous imagery evokes Surrealism's bizarre narratives while subtly questioning modernism's tendency toward abstraction.