Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery opens its fall season with a front-gallery show of David Scanavino’s drawings. The room will be enveloped by a grid of works on archival colored papers, each the same size.
These drawings reflect Scanavino’s daily process of generating iconographic forms that border on abstraction. The wax-crayon works are made with bold colors and lines, reducing natural forms – birds, trees, flowers – into silhouettes and shapes. Scanavino’s use of crayon on construction paper evokes childhood creativity, a theme woven throughout his oeuvre over the past 15 years. This immersive installation offers a close look into Scanavino’s studio, and shows his dedication to experimental mark-making and color. The show’s focus on drawing reveals how he distills images into forms, paving the way for his larger paintings and sculptural installations.
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. This is his fifth solo show with the gallery.
