Locks Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of small-scale shaped paintings and works on paper by David Row (b. 1949). Row’s decades-long exploration of abstract shapes and intersecting geometries is brought into intimate view, highlighting the artist’s process through drawings and studies for his larger paintings on wood panel and canvas.
The starting point of these works centers around coordinates on the paper (sometimes notated with longitudes and latitudes) that reference real-world locales and serve as the nexus for his shifting, idiosyncratic geometries. He builds three-dimensionality on a flat surface through densely layered strokes and overlapping lines, creating highly textured surfaces of streaks and scratches.
Grouped together in the first-floor gallery, these works create a gradient halo, like buoys along a horizon line or a panorama of luminous geodes. Familiar motifs of zeroes and Xs morph throughout the works in truncated, reconfigured forms, drawing upon iconography from his paintings. Row’s inclusion of scribbled notations and occasional newspaper transfers onto the paint point to the world outside the studio—with some drawings tethered to the seventh floor of his New York studio building and others to the ocean near his residence in Maine. The artist has said that these drawings are “an homage to working plein air or to a specific location that holds a strong inspiration to me.”
DAVID ROW (b. 1949) lives and works in New York City and Cushings Island, Maine. He grew up outside of New Haven, CT, and received his BFA and MFA from Yale University in 1972 and 1974, respectively. His works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, the Galleria Nazionale D’Arte Moderna, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, among others. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum in New York (2008).
