Humphrey received a BFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art in 1977 and a MA from New York University in 1980. He has shown nationally and internationally and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rome Prize among other awards. An anthology of his art writing, Blind Handshake, was published by Periscope Publishing in 2010. Mr. Humphrey is is represented by the Fredericks Freiser Gallery, New York.
Though his paintings, works on paper, and sculptures defy categorization, David Humphrey emerged as an artist in the late 1970s along with Postmodernism, an approach that continues to inform his heterogeneous compositions, visual pastiches that, in his words, “erase the breaks” between divergent styles. As he explains: “I suppose that the dynamic of relationship—the psychology of bonding, lovemaking, attachment, and so on—has kept me interested for a long time. I come back to it as a way to thicken the grammar of picture making.” In his paintings, this grammar includes gestural abstraction, cartoonish figuration, pop art, surrealism, and Expressionism. His vibrant compositions feature human figures, narrative vignettes, animals, and objects interwoven into abstract passages. They read as sexually and psychologically charged dreamscapes, through which Humphrey breaks down boundaries to explore our relationships with each other and the world.
