NOTHING REAL

David Deutsch

April 1 – May 15, 2011

SOUTHFIRST is proud to present “Nothing Real,” an exhibition of new paintings by the artist David Deutsch. The acrylic-on-linen paintings are created with a monotype transfer process. The work itself has the hazy distance of memory: pink and tanned figures, boxy station wagons and West coast driveways predominate. The exhibition will be on view from April 1 – May 15, 2011.

“This violently ecstatic work depicts figurative vignettes surrounded by fields of wild brushwork. The paintings have the energy of gestural abstraction but an emotional presence that is personal and immersed in memory. Men, tensely paired or single, inhabit charged moments of regard. The images are elegies to need and union.

Deutsch has long utilized contemporary industrial materials for rigorous aesthetic ends. Recently he has painted with acrylic on plastic sheeting, then transferred the choice images to linen, retaining the velocity of pigment applied to a slick material. The folds of the plastic and scratched paint add layers of physicality to the storms of hot dull SoCal color.

Deutsch’s ‘pictures generation’ contemporaries flipped received images into high-energy aesthetic contexts. In the last two decades, Deutsch’s rotunda paintings and eagle-eyed house photographs employed an Olympian distance. His new works, from a bit closer vantage but with a wider view, plunge us into intimate tableaux. These images are elegantly made and brutally seen.”

-Dan Torop

Born in Los Angeles, David Deutsch graduated from UCLA, attended the California Institute of Arts (then Chouinard), and moved to New York in 1971. He has exhibited extensively over the past thirty years including in the Venice Biennale and in solo shows at Annina Nosei gallery, Christine Burgin Gallery, and Jay Gorney Modern Art, NY. He is represented by Feature Inc. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Hirschhorn Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, among others. In 2004, Twin Palms Press published David Deutsch: Paintings/Photographs. His photographs will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in “Night Vision: Photography After Dark,” April 26 – September 5, 2011.

SOUTHFIRST, founded in 2000, is located on 60 N6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn between Wythe and Kent Avenues. Gallery hours are Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 PM and by appointment. Subway: L train to Bedford Avenue. For more information, please contact Maika Pollack at 718 599 4884 or info@southfirst.org.