Peter Blum

David Rabinowitch

Périgord Construction of Vision Drawings

18 Jan - 16 Mar 2019

David Rabinowitch "Untitled (Périgord)", 2013
crayon, oil, wax and graphite on paper
26 x 26 inches (66 x 66 cm)
Peter Blum Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of works on paper by David Rabinowitch entitled "Périgord Construction of Vision Drawings" at 176 Grand Street, New York. This is the artist’s seventh solo show with the gallery. There will be an opening reception on Friday, January 18, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through March 9, 2019.

David Rabinowitch started visiting the Périgord region in southern France in 2009. Périgord has some of the best preserved 10th - 12th Century Romanesque churches in Europe and has become a place that Rabinowitch has been revisiting and making sketches of since 2011. These ecclesiastical structures serve as a conceptual framework which the ongoing series of "Périgord Construction of Vision Drawings" has emerged from. Rather than literal representation, this series engages with what Rabinowitch has grasped, digested, or been altered by his experience in the Périgord.

The "Périgord" works create an arena in which content and form are conflated. At the outset, the drawings are coated to varying degrees with layers of beeswax. Upon this ground, Rabinowitch uses an indirect process of material application in which color pigment, oil stick, linseed oil, and wax are applied to hand cut templates and pressed onto the surface of the paper. By building up each work in this way, the forms move freely in relation to one another without subordinating themselves to an overall image, surface, or unity of composition. Instead, what their similarities and differences construct is the very process of perception—the construction of vision.



David Rabinowitch, born in 1943 in Toronto, Canada, has shown extensively in Europe, Canada and the United States. Selected solo museum exhibitions include: Museum Wiesbaden, Germany (2017); Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf (2016); Haus der Kunst St. Josef, Solothurn, Switzerland (2012); Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern, Germany (2010); The Chinati Foundation, Marfa, Texas (2008); Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland (2004); National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (2004); A major retrospective of his work took place in 2003 at the Musée d’art Contemporain de Montréal, Quebec.

Public collections include: Museum of Modern Art, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; San Francisco Museum of Art, CA; Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; National Gallery, D.C.; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University MA; Walker Art Center; MN; Cleveland Museum of Art, OH; Hammer Museum, LA, CA; Chinati Foundation, Marfa; TX; Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland; Goetz Collection, Munich, Germany; Museum Haus Lange, Germany; Kuntsmuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; among many others.


For additional information and photographic material please contact David Blum or Vlad Smolkin at art@peterblumgallery.com, Gallery hours: Tuesday-Friday, 10am-6pm; Saturday, 11am-6pm.