David Norvos
“Wall Paintings”
New York, 534 West 21st Street
Monumentally scaled to the gallery’s main location at 534 West 21st Street, the works each measure between thirteen and fifteen feet wide and are comprised of modular painted panels and large open areas of wall. Novros is known for his meticulous attention to the materiality of color, and his newest paintings radiate with exceedingly vibrant and deep complementary hues. The exhibition will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue with an essay by Ann Lauterbach.
Installation view, David Novros: Wall Paintings, Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery
A preeminent painter of his generation, in the 1960s Novros exhibited at the New York artists’ collective Park Place, Bykert Gallery in New York, and Dwan Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. The innovations Novros brought to painting––such as a repeated use of modular forms and a unique focus on the significance of permanent installation—were hugely influential, and the position he staked out in those years has been formative to his sixty-year practice. Of the utmost importance to Novros’s work is the active engagement of painting with architecture, an ideal which he observed in painted places such as the Alhambra in Grenada, Spain, during travels in Europe in 1963-64, and which left a huge impression on the young painter early in his career. Since then, Novros has produced painting that is in direct relationship with the surrounding architecture, such as site-specific murals. The first of these was a fresco commissioned by Donald Judd in 1971 for the second floor of his home and studio in SoHo, now the Judd Foundation.
