Tanya Leighton

David Diao - Best Laid Plans

30 Oct 2008 - 10 Jan 2009

David Diao
‘Do You Ever Move the Furniture?’, 2007
Acrylic and vinyl on canvas; 46 x 91,5 x 3,2 cm
Unique
DIAO-2008-0007
David Diao, installation view, 2008
David Diao, installation view, 2008
David Diao, installation view, 2008
David Diao
Best Laid Plans
30 October - 10 January 2009
Preview Wednesday 29 October, 7-9pm
Special Event: Artist's talk, 6pm

For over forty years David Diao has made remarkable works that borrow from the history of modernist painting. Tanya Leighton Gallery will showcase new and recent paintings and works on paper by this eminent abstractionist. Best Laid Plans is David Diao’s first solo exhibition in Germany and his first at Tanya Leighton.

In the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Diao’s work engaged formalist concerns of process and material, and in the mid-80s he moved towards addressing modernism’s discursive and materialist formations in his paintings. In this recent body of work, he questions some of the culturally ingrained truisms of art making: genius, permanence, expression, and autonomy. The artist’s key question in this exhibition is: “Can digging among the remnants be a means to rescue whatever criticality the project of modern painting had once imagined?” (Diao)
 

Tags: David Diao