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BOMB

Portfolio by David Gilbert: Suburban sprawl and craft-store spree meet creeping apocalyptic bleakness.

By Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer

August 3, 2017

Gilbert Email 0637
David Gilbert, The Walker, image 2014, print 2017, color photograph. All images courtesy of the artist and Klauss von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York.

In David Gilbert’s studio, odds and ends appear and reappear through the revolving door of his many temporary sculptural constructions. Process, mutability, and the space of solitary play are central subjects. Recycled pieces of fabric, drapery, scraps of wood, wire, cut cardboard and paper, other photos, painted motifs, yarn, cord, ceramics, and stickers come and go, speaking not of Michelangelo but of a latter-day tween-on-a-budget twist on Giacometti’s emaciated sickly figures—suburban sprawl and craft-store spree meet creeping apocalyptic bleakness on the one hand, and tenderness with a sweet attention to detail on the other. Gilbert’s photographs gathered here represent his portrait mode: a set of singular if fleeting figures, both ridiculous and touching, poignant and exposed and devastated and silly, posing and vogueing for the camera in a rather formal, even proud sort of succession.