TIVOLI, New York – Michael David and I met on the last day of his exhibition, The Navigator, at Private Public in Hudson, New York. We spent the afternoon talking about his work and career, and a few weeks later he invited me to his studio in Tivoli. I knew David as the founder and director of the Yellow Chair Salon, a virtual program offering online critiques in a number of different formats, one of which I co-teach with him and the abstract painter Astrid Dick. He told me that he started the Yellow Chair Salon from his Brooklyn apartment at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, after getting many responses to the critique prompts he posted on Facebook.
Between 2011 and ’14, he lived and worked on and off in Atlanta. While there, he met and befriend William “Bill” Arnett, the founder and chairman of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation, which is devoted to collecting, preserving, and documenting work by Black artists from the Deep South. David became friends with two of these artists, Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley, with whom he felt an artistic kinship. In 2014, David moved back to Brooklyn and started the gallery Life on Mars, titled after a David Bowie song. He chose the name in response to the belief that painting was dead once again; he wanted to suggest that painting was alive on Mars or that painters were not from this planet.
Michael David, “Self Portrait as a Golem” (1998), oil and encaustic on wooden panel
When I visited David’s studio, I was most interested in learning about his art practice. In 2001, he overheated encaustic in his studio and was poisoned by the gases, resulting in permanent nerve damage to both of his legs. When he began painting again, two years later, he created a series he called Fallen Toreadors, based on Edouard Manet’s “The Dead Toreador” (1864). David considers all the paintings in this series, which riffs off of Manet and Francisco Goya’s 14 “Black Paintings” (1820–23), to be self-portraits.
David’s “Dead Toreador (After Manet) (quadriptych)” (2003), an acrylic and mixed-media work on four separate pieces of canvas mounted on board, measures 109 by 240 inches, larger than life-size. The fallen figure is set against a streaked, scumbled, scraped ground that shares something with the vigorous brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. After making smaller pieces, working on this scale was a test: Could David make a huge painting or self-portrait? By comparison, “Self Portrait as a Golem” (1998), done in oil and encaustic on wood, is 54 by 59 inches.
Michael David, “Berlin Gothic” (1981), pigment and wax on paper; collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
A golem is a shapeless being from Jewish folklore that is made out of inanimate material, such as pigment (colored earth) and encaustic, and begins as a helper but turns destructive. One can read these two self-portraits as a metaphor for David’s evolution from his early, toxic processes to his near-death creating art. As autobiographical pieces connected to Abstract Expressionism and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, they are lacerating self-reflections with no trace of self-pity.
Looking back at his early work, David’s use of encaustic on object-like structures, including “Berlin Gothic” (1981), a black cross encrusted with pigment and encaustic on wood, speaks to his interest in visceral materials, symbols, and loaded subject matter. Despite the disruptions, this fascination has remained strong. As we sat in his studio, surrounded by artwork composed of materials such as mirrored glass, silicone, wax, acrylic, and resin, I asked him how he achieved the patterns in the broken glass. He told he drew with a hammer, using different parts including the claw and handle, to score lines and crack the glass. His process of destroying mirrored surfaces to generate different patterns, as in “Untitled 9” (2022–25), brings to mind the poet William Butler Yeats’s lines from “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born.”
As with his earlier work, David’s broken glass pieces resonate with the art of his contemporaries and earlier generations of modern masters. In “Vanitas” and “Black Vanitas” (both 2023), he takes on the genre of still life popularized by Baroque Dutch and Spanish painters who depicted skulls to symbolize the transience of life. Instead of depicting objects, David’s shattered glass literally mirrors the viewer. Looking into them, we are beckoned to reflect upon ourselves.
Michael David, “Black Vanitas” (2023), mirror, silicone, resin, oil, and acrylic on birch plywood
“The Bride Stripped Bare” (2015–25), David’s most ambitious piece incorporating cracked glass, is a direct reference to Marcel Duchamp’s famous “The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass)” (1915–23). The work is made of sections of glass, each shattered in a different way, with the title painted on a rough piece of found wood attached to the left side. The fissures can be seen as lines in a drawing.
David’s use of distressed and forlorn materials evokes Robert Rauschenberg’s early Combines, while his integration of painted wood recalls the creations of Dial and Holley. As I looked around his studio, the allusions and connections came to mind but, more importantly, quickly left. In an age in which originality seems to be an obsolete goal, David has done something unexpected and necessary — he has referred to masterworks without resorting to the familiar tropes of parody or imitation, and without losing his individuality.
Is “The Bride Stripped Bare” an attempt to destroy Duchamp’s legacy, honor him, or both? Does art have to be either/or, or can it both/and? David’s ability to hold contradictory viewpoints simultaneously while adding something personal infuses his art with pain, anger, and love for the work of others.
Michael David, “Untitled 9” (2022-25), mirrored glass, tar, resin, silicone, and oil paint on wooden panels
