David Scanavino
Italian Painting (Studies)
In the fall of 2025, David Scanavino spent time on a teaching residency in Florence, Italy. His observations of the bichromatic marble cladding of Italian Romanesque buildings embedded themselves in his visual memory.
Upon returning to his studio in the U.S., he began making gouache studies on graphed notebook paper to work out ideas of geometry and composition.
In these works, Scanavino employs a strategy based on these alternating colors, laying pencil and paint over the grid to develop a distinctive language of pattern and motifs. The ideas worked out in these initial studies led to the encaustic works in his current show, Italian Painting at Klaus Gallery.
The gallery is pleased to share these original gouache-on-paper works here.
I’d just walk around the city at night and the way Florence is set up – since it’s a medieval city – you have these very small, narrow roads and as you turn a corner, all of a sudden you’re face-to-face with this striped side of a building in green and white. At the time I thought it was very beautiful, but I wasn’t aware of what an impression it made until I was back in my studio.
– David Scanavino, during a conversation at the gallery with Timothy Hull, Mathew Cerletty, and Julia Rommel, April 23, 2026
David Scanavino
untitled, 2026
gouache on graph paper
11 × 8 ½ inches (27.94 × 21.59 cm)
DS1551
Snapshots from the artist’s time in Italy
David Scanavino: Italian Painting is currently on view at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery through May 9, 2026.
Visit the show page on our website here.
David Scanavino has created major installations in recent years at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT; the Pulitzer Foundation in St. Louis, MO; and the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University in Houston, TX. He is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design and lives and works in Providence, RI. Scanavino’s work is held in the collections of the RISD Museum, The Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, and the Baltimore Museum of Art. This is his sixth solo show with the gallery.
For more information about David Scanavino, visit his artist page on our website