21 x 14 inches, framed
David Gilbert’s (b. 1982, New York, NY) photographs are situated in the unique crossroads of sculpture, drawing, painting, installation, and image reproduction. Using these various media, Gilbert stages and documents assemblages and groupings of objects organized into complex and intriguing mise-en-scène within his studio. His photographs invite interpretation, indeterminately reading as traces of action, aftermath, something in progress; or, an incident, accidentally perceived. Characterized by a sense of open-ended mystery and adumbration, the work willfully embraces ambiguity as a generative, queer position.
Gilbert’s images are known to gracefully teem with draped curtains, window-sourced lighting, and a soft, accidental voyeurism. Shadows function as compositional and narrative devices, which help create the contemplative and melancholic mood of the photos while also inevitably reflecting on the indexical and intrinsically haunted nature of photography. In the case of Gilbert, a photography haunted by the absence of bodies, muted longing, and loss.
He received his BFA from Tisch School of the Arts, New York University in 2004 and his MFA from the University of California, Riverside in 2011. Flutter, Gilbert’s first solo institutional exhibition, opened at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art (SECCA), Winston-Salem, in 2024.
Gilbert’s work is in the collections of the Cleveland Clinic Art Collection; Los Angeles Museum of Art; and the Marciano Art Foundation.
David Gilbert’s first monograph, Lillies, is currently available for pre-order from Zolo Press. Spanning more than a decade of his practice, Lillies gathers 114 photographs, each composition depicting scenes of interiority, scaled-up dioramas of the artist’s psychic landscape embodying what it might mean to be an artist. The book is completed by an essay by writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, which contextualizes and expands Gilbert’s oeuvre, making Lillies a celebration of the temporary, the provisional, the impermanent, and the transitory.
