Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery is pleased to open our fall season with a show of new works by David Scanavino. 

The exhibition will feature a series of large paintings on tanned cowhide mounted on linen, upon which Scanavino has painted archetypal shapes evoking birds and flowers. The resulting color-saturated, hard-edged forms stand in contrast to the singular organic qualities of each hide. The scars, stretchmarks, and distinctive shape of the surfaces create a synthesis that is at once playful yet underpinned with a suggestion of loss or violence. 

Scanavino, who has lived in the Northeast for the last twenty-five years, was originally born and raised in Colorado. He has looked to his childhood landscape and the artistic traditions from the Western and Mountain States of the US as inspiration for this body of work. Shown alongside the paintings will be a suite of color pencil drawings on graph paper. These labor intensive works, created by layering veils of color through repetitive mark making, explore ideas of intuition and metaphor against the confines of an underlying geometric structure. 

David Scanavino received an MFA from Yale University and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has had solo gallery shows in New York and Los Angeles, and institutional solo shows at the Moody Center for the Arts, Rice University, Houston, TX (2017), the Pulitzer Art Foundation, St. Louis, MO (2014), and the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2014). A large-scale commission for the Columbus Metropolitan Public Library, Columbus, OH was executed and installed in 2015. He currently lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.