NICOLE FIACCO GALLERY

The Nicole Fiacco Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with New York artist David Deutsch (American b. 1943).  Deutsch will present a selection of recent paintings and drawings that are informed by his ongoing series of Nightsun spotlight photographs that will also be on view, installed in suites and grids.

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For nearly 30 years, David Deutsch has painted and photographed domestic architecture in ways that make his otherwise innocuous subjects appear alien.  Using an aerial perspective, coupled with the dramatic use of color in the paintings and the play of light and dark in the photographs, Deutsch’s work elicits an anxious psychological response that is equally about what is not revealed in the works, as by what is suggested in their formal qualities.  Tension builds between opposites: nature and culture, light and dark, painting and photography, representation and abstraction, inclusion and isolation, and so on.

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Of Deutsch’s paintings, a 2001 Art Forum review suggested that, “Like Edward Hopper, Deutsch’s suburban abodes are metaphors for the way that, in modern society, autonomy tends to slide into isolation and voyeurism increasingly usurps more meaningful forms of human contact.  But Deutsch’s realism derives not from the observation of life (as Hopper’s did) but from the imitation of a photographic image.  In this respect Deutsch’s paintings point to a very different predecessor: Gerhard Richter”.  

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Deutsch shoots the Nightsun photographs from a helicopter using a police searchlight.  The resulting images, as described in an Art in America review, are “centered in a circular glow, buildings cast long shadows, while complete darkness takes over beyond the perimeter of light.  The high contrast gives the otherwise mundane scene a tension that borders on paranoia…The nocturnal image is like a still from a film noir: you imagine a narrative of intrigue and dread to suit the photo’s formal drama”.

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David Deutsch (b. Los Angeles, CA 1943), lives and works in New York City.  He attended the University of California, Los Angeles and the California Institute of Arts, Chouinard, CA.  Deutsch’s work can be found in the permanent collections of museums including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Brooklyn Museum, Brookyn, NY; Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY;Museo RufinoTamayo, Mexico City, Mexico; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.  Deutsch’s work has been exhibited extensively at galleries including Annina Nosei Gallery, BlumHelman Gallery, Andrea Rosen Gallery, Nicole Klagsbrun, Lehmann Maupin Gallery and Marianne Boesky Gallery, among many others.  Deutsch’s work has been reviewed in publications including Art in America, Artnews, Art Forum, The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, Tema Celeste and Newsweek, among others.  In 2004, David Deutsch: Paintings/Photographs was published by Twin Palms Press.