(New York: Upper East Side) Garvey|Simon is pleased to present David Morrison: New Drawings, opening September 29, 2021 at DFN Projects, 16 East 79th Street, Suite G-2, New York, NY 10075. David Morrison’s hyperrealist color pencil drawings of Irises and Bonsai plants are celebrations of nature’s intricacies. Equal parts scientific and poetic, Morrison’s floral still lifes take on a preternatural quality, blurring the boundary between realism and fantasy. David Morrison: New Drawings is on view September 29th through October 20th at DFN Projects. An indoor/outdoor opening reception will take place at DFN Projects on Wednesday, September 29th from 5:30-7:30pm (weather permitting.) DFN Projects is open Monday through Friday, 11am to 4pm.

Ever-interested in delicate and often toiling labor, David Morrison’s newest body of work stems from his practice as a master gardener. David’s methodical cultivation of irises and bonsai plants is matched by his handling of colored pencils. He knows and understands his subjects from the inside out; from conception to flowering fruition. As a result, no detail or nuance goes unnoticed or unaccounted for. The enigmatic, near-mystical quality of Morrison’s subjects emerges from the articulation of these details. Brought into vivid clarity by Morrison’s hand, petals and fronds are transformed into their own miniature terrains, and in turn, a world unto themselves. Packed with detail and texture, the blooms possess an ethereal power.

Though serene and regal, there is a sense of mischief present in Morrison’s drawings. Contradictions and visual puns are woven into his compositions, conspiring with hyperrealism to turn the “still life” genre onto its head. The carefully modulated shadowing around Morrison’s subjects endow them with a sense of depth, using a trompe l’oeil effect to add weight and tangibility to these frozen facsimiles. Vibrant almost glowing irises are severed from their life-giving root systems; the bonsai plants are replicas of replicas of trees. Morrison’s drawings are so very real that they appear unreal, a fact of which Morrison is delightfully self-aware.

Morrison possesses a rare gift for assessing the visual surface and texture of reality. He shares his gift with us, the viewers of his drawings, and in our experience with his art we witness the intensity of his creative process. Controlling layers of translucent marks made by prismacolor pencils - hour after hour after hour - Morrison produces a dense network of colors on a sheet of paper that slowly, magically, becomes a portion of the world transformed into a work of art. His drawings trigger our perceptions refreshed by uncanny clarity.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

David Morrison was born in Council Bluffs, Iowa in 1956. He received his MFA in Printmaking from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985. A visiting lecturer and guest artist at numerous universities, he is very involved in the world of printmaking, specifically stone lithography, and he is the Professor Emeritus at Indiana University’s Herron School of Art and Design in Indianapolis. Morrison has exhibited widely, and his work is included in numerous public collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, The New-York Historical Society, The National Gallery of Art, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Figge Art Museum, the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Portland Museum of Art, to name a few. This is his third solo show in New York, and his fourth solo show with Garvey|Simon.

For further information and to see more images, please visit Garvey Simon or contact Elizabeth Garvey at liz@garveysimon.com or 917-796-2146.