David Humphrey

Interviews by Brainard Carey

David Humphrey has maintained a forty-year commitment to making formally inventive, psycho-socially engaged paintings. Over this time he has continued to transform images from the public realm into imaginative hybrids of the social and eccentrically individual, the historic and vividly contemporary. His work celebrates the peculiar nesting within the familiar. Mixing various representational schema with improvisational abstraction, he tells stories of vexed intimacy, political/ socio reality, and imaginative projections crashing into the real.

David Humphrey (b. 1955) has been the subject of 44 solo exhibitions including McKee Gallery, NY; Sikkema Jenkins, NY; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati. His work is in the collections of several museums and public collections including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston as well as the Saatchi Gallery, London. He is currently teaching in the MFA program of Columbia. He was awarded the Rome Prize in 2008. Humphrey has had five solo exhibitions at Fredericks & Freiser.

David Humphrey, Colored Drinks, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 72 x 60 inches

David Humphrey, Plant Thoughts, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 60 x 72 inches

David Humphrey, Wolf, 2024 Acrylic on canvas 54 x 44 inches