David Deutsch

"Like Beckett, Giacometti and Bacon, David Deutsch draws attention to the repeated use of cages—to re-think the status of bodies in space. David Deutsch is preoccupied with these questions, and the use of cages in his paintings, in form of a web of grids, a house or a car. These cages are framing the stage - a frame that doesn’t disappear in the representation but rather stands out from it, drawing attention to the limits of that representation. This point is particularly interesting because for Beckett, Giacometti and Bacon, like for David Deutsch, the possibility of existential freedom, or a subject who freely chooses to make meaning in a meaningless world, is gone."

- Ugo Rondinone

Originally from Los Angeles, David Deutsch (b. 1943) developed a life-long interest in the Planetarium, which he expresses in his conceptual paintings that includes telescopic landscape vistas and large arrangements of tiny portraits. He is especially fascinated by virtual nothingness, that which appears vast and endlessly deep or that which is perceived but not obviously visible. Some of his paintings are created from aerial photographs and have been the subject of a series called "Surveillance." In the mid-1970s, he was painting rooms filled with technological equipment such as video cameras, receivers, and tape recorders, as well as landscapes with abstract figures and technology. But his landscape panoramas without figures brought him his primary attention. Known primarily as a landscape painter, David Deutsch’s latest paintings are representational, abstract, wildly painterly and idiosyncratic. Despite their initially crude appearance, Deutsch’s paintings are grown-up, complex of space and surface, and rich in notions of human interaction or the lack thereof; voyeurism and solitude; and often an ambiguous ominousness. The swirling brushwork can read as the tensions of everyday life, a darker societal gloom, rough weather or some other disaster.

In 1972, Deutsch had his first solo show in Los Angeles at the Michael Walls gallery, and that same year he moved to New York City but set up a routine of spending his summers in Maine. He first lived in a loft in the West Village and became a part of group shows with well-known artists such as Robert Mangold, Keith Sonnier, and Brice Marden. By the late 1990s, his studio was in a four-story town house in mid-town Manhattan.

Deutsch has exhibited in galleries including Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Christine Burgin Gallery, New York; Kerry Schuss, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles and more. Deutsch is also in collections at institutions including Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City and more.

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