David Stern: The American Years (1995-2008) is a comprehensive examination of painter, David Stern’s work since his immigration to the United States in 1994. Karen Wilkin is the curator of this national traveling exhibition and primary author of the accompanying catalogue.

The show is comprised of about 40 paintings and drawings by Stern, who was born (1956) and educated in Germany and who has lived in New York City since 1995. As Karen Wilkin has pointed out, “David Stern’s history as an artist encapsulates, in many ways, the wholly modern notion of the ‘artist without borders’ whose work reflects the multivalent experience of an increasingly globalized world.” His forceful and energetic canvases, covered in inches-thick layers of paint, convey the dizzying, exciting, and sometimes sinister experience of the modern metropolis. Stern has referred to himself as an “action painter,” echoing the artistic legacies of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Yet his captivating human forms—by turns tragic, grotesque, and vulnerable—reach further back to histories of portraiture.

The exhibition is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, with partial funding from Rivki and Lindsay Rosenwald and Otto Brandl Transport GmbH Cologne, Germany.
Artist Website »