David Humphrey in London

LONDON—Before packing up and moving to a new space on Vyner Street in January 2008, London’s Keith Talent Gallery is staging a final exhibition at its Tudor Road location of new paintings by American artist David Humphrey. Humphrey, who is represented in New York by Sikkema Jenkins and Co. and has shown for over twenty years, is an artist who’s found an assured stride, manipulating paint to meet his ever-changing vocabulary of color, form, and design. Creating his own shorthand, he renders countless subjects in a manner completely of the moment, yet stylized, highly personal, and frequently cartoonish. 

Humphrey reveres kitsch imagery and prefers his narratives veiled. The bright palette used in his canvases is put to good use—it blocks out areas around the main subjects, who seem trapped in a Bizarro world parallel to our own. Humphrey leaps into every project with a can-do attitude, blending abstraction and a love for mark-making with a confident hand. Many of his new works feature couples, whether man and woman, man and beast, or two fine-feathered friends. Napping (2007) features a male figure lounging next to a tiger, a bright scene unfolding around them in swirls of color. In Bird Friends (2007), two tiny blue birds perch on a branch leading from a tree composed of interlocking dripping violet brush strokes to a giant patchwork flower. And are the hyperbolic tears flowing from the eyes of the erotically merged figures in Their Weather (2007) signs of joy or anguish? Like your hairdresser, only Humphrey knows for sure.

Stop by Humphrey’s exhibition at Keith Talent Gallery, on view through December 15. For afterward, David Humphrey told ARTINFO his suggestions for gallery-going about town:

1. Ellen Altfest: Paintings at White Cube, Hoxton Square, through November 24
“From across the room, Ellen Altfest’s paintings look like old-school still-life and figure paintings. Put your nose up to them and they fracture and reconfigure into a disciplined ecstasy of matter and vision.”

2. Georg Baselitz at the Royal Academy of Arts, through December 9
“This compressed retrospective makes the best case for Baselitz’s blow-hard Expressionism. The emphasis on his early paintings of aroused wanderers and human chunks anchors the hot air of his later upside-down Mannerism.”

3. Alexis Harding: Depthplunge at Mummery + Schnelle, through December 15
“Gravity has a lot to say in Alexis Harding’s gooey process paintings. His truth to materials testifies to much warping and straining of wetness as it attempts to dry.”

4. Linder at Stuart Shave/Modern Art, through December 21
“What’s not to like about period erotica with appliances and flowers substituted for heads? Hannah Hoch would be proud to have Linder as her irreverent great granddaughter.”

And in case you missed them, Humphrey summarizes three recent meritorious solo affairs:

Chuck Close: Family and Others at White Cube Mason’s Yard
“Chuck Close’s new paintings look good from about 17 feet, where his depiction methods seem to extract a lunatic potential from the features of his portrait subjects. One step closer and the mark-making becomes uninspired; step away and the paintings become familiar brand-name heads.”

Alice Walton: There Is No Future for Us Now at Five Years
“I would be happy to live in a house made by Alice Walton, even if everything were made of used cardboard. Her room-divider sculpture is at once pedestal, bookshelf, display hutch, and secret hiding place rich with eccentric patterning and willful lacunae.”

David Batchelor: Unplugged (remix) at Wilkinson Gallery
“Hunter/gatherer and color theorist David Batchelor makes festive trees out of cheap plastic objects. His smaller tabletop sculptures are haiku essays on the wounded beauty and animist potential of everyday objects.”