David Novros USA, b. 1941

Overview

"I traveled through Spain, Italy, France. I looked at everything I could. It was the Alhambra, first, that gave me the feeling that a painting could be something other than a rectangle hanging on a wall in a museum. That a painting does not even have to be made of paint. Then the monastery of San Marco on Florence with its Fra Angelicos in the cells. And Giotto in Padua. Painting in place, as I call it, painting created for a place that stays there, that’s what impressed me most. On this journey the desire arose to make large-format painting for very specific places."

David Novros is an American artist and member of the Park Place gallery Collective of SoHo, as well as one of the very first artists, along with Brice Marden, Dorothea Rockburne, Chuck Close and Ralph Humphrey, of the renowned Bykert gallery in NYC. Novros is mainly known for his pioneering monochromatic abstract paintings on colossal modular and irregular canvas.

Growing up in Los Angeles, Novros often painted murals on his parents’ garage. Thus began the artist’s commitment to “painting as wall and on wall.” Influenced by a variety of art historical sources, including Native American pottery, Byzantine mosaics, Italian frescoes and the mural-scale paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, Novros likens his work from this period to portable murals and aims to communicate the emotional power of geometric abstraction. Since the very beginning of his career, David Novros exclusively chose the pictorial art as the privileged medium to reach maximum extensions, differing from more celebrated contemporary artists such as Carl Andre, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd, who instead explored and advanced the minimalistic theory through the means of sculpture.

With their sensuous and reflective surfaces created with multiple layers of sprayed-on acrylic pigment and glazed with Murano (a powdered pigment which is suspended in clear lacquer), Novros’ paintings provide the viewer with new types of perceptual and emotional experiences. He not only seeks to communicate content through monochromatic color, geometric form and complex spatial issues, but he also encourages a kinesthetic viewing experience through the surface’s response to changing light.

Novros is furthermore known for his participation to The Moon Museum project in 1969, when he painted, conjointly with Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, John Chamberlain and Forrest Myers, a small iridium-plated ceramic “wafer”, launched into space on board of the Apollo 12 with the astronauts Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon and Alan Bean.

David Novros (b. 1941, Los Angeles) has exhibited in several prominent venues, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Dallas Museum of Fine Art in Dallas, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and the Bremen Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, Germany.