David Humphrey (born August 30, 1955) is an American painter, art critic, and sculptor associated with the postmodern turn in painting that began in the late 1970s.
[8] In 1984 David Humphrey was included in a group exhibition with George Condo, Carroll Dunham, Kenny Scharf, and others called New Hand-Painted Dreams: Contemporary Surrealism at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, which put forward "neo-surealism" as a possible movement.
[12] His work was most influenced by, and has contributed to, the postmodern shift in painting of the 1970s–1990s, which favored fractured and heterogeneous approaches to form over the modernist preference for progress, refinement, and unity of medium and style.
[13][14][15] His work incorporates both abstract and figurative elements, often blurring them together, and draws from cartoons, amateur paintings by Dwight D. Eisenhower, old family photographs, and other unconventional sources to create stylistically heterogeneous images.
[16][17] David Humphrey began writing criticism in 1990 with a review of an exhibition by Jacqueline Humphries in Lusitania.