David Humphrey

Pickpocket

1985

David Humphrey (born August 30, 1955) is an American painter, art critic, and sculptor associated with the postmodern turn in painting that began in the late 1970s. He is best known for his playful, cartoonish, puzzling paintings, which blend figuration and abstraction and create "allegories" about the medium of painting itself. Humphrey holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (1977) and a MA from New York University (1980), where he studied with film critic Annette Michelson; he also attended the New York Studio School from 1996 – 1997. He has been the recipient of many awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2002, the Rome Prize in 2008, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award in 2011. He was born in Augsburg Germany and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He lives and works in New York City. Though his paintings, works on paper, and sculptures defy categorization, David Humphrey emerged as an artist in the late 1970s along with Postmodernism, an approach that continues to inform his heterogeneous compositions, visual pastiches that, in his words, “erase the breaks” between divergent styles. As he explains: “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship—the psychology of bonding, lovemaking, attachment, and so on—has kept me interested for a long time. I come back to it as a way to thicken the grammar of picture making.” In his paintings, this grammar includes gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, Pop Art, Surrealism, and Expressionism. His vibrant compositions feature human figures, narrative vignettes, animals, and objects interwoven into abstract passages. They read as sexually and psychologically charged dreamscapes, through which Humphrey breaks down boundaries to explore our relationships with each other and the world.