Two Hands with Pliers, 1995
Mixed Media with Lightbox, 10 1/2" x 7 1/2" x 4"
David Webster was born in Wadsworth, Ohio in 1947, and earned his B.F.A. from Miami University, and an M.F.A. from Yale University. After living in France for twenty-two years, he returned to New York. Equally adept in painting, sculpture, and works on paper, he is the recipient of several commissions and a Pollack-Krasner Grant. He has participated in several exhibitions at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Pittsburgh Art Center, the Islip Art Museum, and P.S. 1 Museum, New York, among others. His work is in collections throughout Europe and the United States. In the eighties, his work reflected an interest in mythology, primitive religion, and architecture, exploring such themes as ecology, gender, and healthy through a distilled, often multipart, geometry of symbols. Since the nineties, his imagery has concerned itself with the human body, with light making a frequent appearance in his work. One series exploits the transformative illumination and pictorial qualities of the X-ray to present his own hands and feet as metaphor and language. His painting has also addressed histology, the microscopic study of cells, interpreting complex processes and pathways through lush paintings of biomorphic abstraction.
*Excerpted from Tools as Art: the Hechinger Collection, published by International Arts & Artists