|
biography |
A native of Chicago, educated at Brown and Yale, David Schorr works and resides in New York City and Middletown. He has been Professor of Art at Wesleyan since 1971 where he has taught printmaking, drawing, typography, book design, graphic design and calligraphy. He has been a Fulbright Scholar three times, to Italy in 1975, where he worked at the Calcografia Nazionale and to India in 1998 and 2001. He continues to go to India every year where he is adjunct professor at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad. He has also been a fellow a number of times at Tamarind Institute (America's foremost shop of fine arts lithography).
He is represented by Mary Ryan Gallery in New York City where he shows regularly. In addition has had solo shows in Chicago, Milan, Rome, Naples, Paris, Athens, Toronto, Montreal and Copenhagen. His work has been reproduced extensively in the New York Times, The New Yorker and most significantly The New Republic, for which he has done over three hundred portraits. Schorr has illustrated numerous books, among them Parallel Lives, by Wesleyan author Phyllis Rose and four volumes of the fables of La Fontaine and a collection from Baudelaire translated by Wesleyan Professor Norman Shapiro.
His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Fogg Museum (Harvard), The New York Public Library, The Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Museum of Modern Art, among others. The Yale University Art Gallery just acquired his set of sixty engraved portraits of writers, Unconstraining Voices.
Having had a major solo exhibition The Imaginary Life of Ordinary Things, the dish ran away with the spoon less than a year ago, this faculty exhibition provides an opportunity to first show brand new work, still very much in process. The working title of the project is GOODS (a collective noun much in use in Indian English as in "goods and services" or trucks which are labled "Goods Carriage.") These one-foot- square paintings are of still life subjects with graphics on them, mostly packages. Frequenting the markets in India I am aware how for us in the west goods are represented by the package that contains them. These paintings hope to romanticize those packages in much the way Chardin in eighteen century France would represent a dead rabbit and onions. And as a footnote only, I provide some digital images of goods in Indian markets.
Having worked for years on paper in etching, engraving, lithography, woodcut, and drawingand always with the human figurefifteen years ago I turned to canvas for a series of paintings about AIDS and early death (SONGS with a dying fall) so I could layer the backgrounds, dissolving the figures in the ether of space to suggest loss and memory. The work on cloth continued when I went to India, in fact cloth itself became the focus. I began painting figures wearing traditional draped garments and using actual khadi, hand-spun, hand-woven Indian cloth, as my ground. My most recent show returned to traditional painter's linen as a ground, but lost the figure as a subject. These paintings The Imaginary Life of Ordinary Things, the dish ran away with the spoon portrayed handkerchiefs and coffee cups and other simple objects floating in space. At the very end of this work I chose objects with commercial graphics on them (Gauloises cigarette packs, Coleman's Mustard tins, and books) and it is these subjects which led directly to this present work.
|
![[Wesleyan University]](http://www.wesleyan.edu/templates/utilities/navbar_2009/logo.gif "Wesleyan University front door"){kind=logo}
