Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to present “Heaven and Earth,” David Gilbert’s fifth solo exhibition at the gallery. In this show, Gilbert photographs the walls of his LA studio adorned with paper cut-outs and painted canvases. Gilbert culls from an elemental set of imagery including a foot taken from a Renaissance fresco, botany textbook illustrations, and emojis. These symbols come together to tell of their own “becoming” in the studio, repeating and changing from photograph to photograph. Language is key to these pictures as Gilbert explores non-, pre-, or post-verbal communication. 

The tenor of the images changes as the light does. With a camera, Gilbert transforms what we see using dramatic natural lighting, creating pictures with a strange sense of scale and atmosphere. Gilbert is playing with flatness: there’s a trompe-l’oeil effect of a wall having the illusion of great depth. In a similar vein, a large-scale photo mural immerses viewers in Gilbert’s studio, while smaller framed prints draw us into the intimate privacy of Gilbert’s practice. 

David Gilbert (b.1982) lives in Los Angeles, California. His work has been written about in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Artforum, and X-TRA. Most recently, he has had solo exhibitions with Chris Sharp Gallery in Los Angeles, Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco, and 12.26 in Dallas, TX. Past exhibition venues include The Finley, Various Small Fires, and Del Vaz Projects, in Los Angeles, and Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York. Gilbert’s work is held in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). He holds a BFA from the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and an MFA from the University of California, Riverside. 

Download the essay written by Matthew Schneier on the occasion of David Gilbert’s Heaven and Earth exhibition.