Enrico David
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Enrico David (born 1966, Ancona, Italy) is an artist based in London.
David studied Fine Art at Central St. Martins [1] in London.
He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including the 2003 Venice Biennale [2], “Hard Candy” at Galerie Wieland [3] in Berlin, “Monuments to the USA”, CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts [4] in San Francisco and “The Best Book About Pessimism I Ever Read” at Kunstverein Braunschweig [5]. He is represented by Cabinet [6] in London and Galerie Daniel Buchholtz [7] in Berlin.
Enrico David’s work takes in drawing, sculpture and installation and usually involves an adaptation of traditional craft techniques and design styles in order to question the passage of visual culture throughout history and the many alternatives to ‘fine art’. David is best known for his elaborate embroidered compositions of highly stylised figures in art-deco technicolour. These large-scale portraits are derived, like most of David’s work, from a basis of drawing, but for these sewn canvases David also begins by making collages from sources such as fashion magazines. This particular reference is not surprising as the figures rendered through David’s painstaking needle and thread process have the attitude and poses of fashion models; sleek, stylish and androgynous, David’s composite characters wear the hot pinks and acidic greens that most people wouldn’t dare to. Often silhouettes of black with shockingly bright areas of colour and pattern, David’s portraits are effortlessly nonchalant in a way that their method of production can never be. Just as his slightly camp figures confuse the boundaries of gender separation, David blurs the edges between the masculine and feminine roles through his embrace of craft.
