David Sharpe (artist)
David Sharpe (born 1944) is an American artist, known for his stylized and expressionist paintings of the figure and landscape and for early works of densely packed, organic abstraction.
[2][1] Influential Chicago critic Dennis Adrian championed Sharpe's work at the time,[3] describing him as unusually self-possessed, confident and "completely formed" while still in school.
[11] Sharpe's work was recognized very early in his career for its formal sophistication and maturity, which some critics suggest provided him with the confidence and credibility to develop it in relatively dramatic, stylistic shifts.
[1][2] When Sharpe left SAIC, he was creating complex, vibrant abstract works noted for their bright color, tightly clustered compositions, and adventurous mix of formal strategies.
[2][3] Dennis Adrian described the paintings as containing so much visual incident that viewers could neither take in their totality, nor "exhaust their delights," while Jane Allen noted their "kaleidoscopic effect of moving forms and colors.
[2][23] Art in America’s Joanna Frueh suggested Sharpe’s formal experiments were a quest to realize the inspiration experienced by early modernists and the Abstract Expressionists, within an independent language that rivaled but did not imitate them.
[32][3][29][33] Less contained than his earlier works and lacking a single focal point, these still-complex compositions featured a patchwork of vignettes spread laterally across formats that were unified by color and rhythm.
[34][35][36][37] Based on drawings representing Sharpe's experience of the midwestern American landscape,[34][1] the paintings appeared primarily abstract except for their compositions—which suggested panoramas of mountains, rivers and geography, surveyed from above—and marks, which seemed to reference architectural and topographical signs and symbols.
[3] Joanna Frueh described them as a "lyrical fulfillment" of Sharpe's vision that resembled a "vast, integrated organism" expressing union, contentedness, buoyancy and playfulness.
[7] Sharpe somewhat controversially introduced figures (frequently based on his wife, Anne Abrons) into his work in the late 1970s, a development that critic William Zimmer, among others, called "an artistic gamble whose outcome is still in the balance.
[36] In works such as Demeter (1985), which New York Times critic Grace Glueck noted for its deadpan satire and camp drollery, he addressed the voyeuristic and theatrical aspects of looking and reading art.
[41] Depicted in a "faux naif" style, with typically complex, frieze-like compositions referencing Poussin, Millet and 17th-century Dutch genre painters, these paintings were considered some of the most satisfying Sharpe had created.
