DAVID NOVROS

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Selected Works

Salidas, 2016

oil on canvas
overall: 700 x 500 cm.; 275 5/8 x 196 7/8 in.
Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden
Photo: Bernd Fickert / Museum Wiesbaden

In 2014 I went to Catalonia and in my travels I found a notebook in Cadaques. The book was meant to be a registry of the people who were discharged from the hospital in Santa Pau (near Olot). I took the book back to Empuries, and began a series of drawings that referenced paintings I had made 25 years earlier. I had kept a number of planes from those paintings and I began thinking about arranging them in a way that suggested a new and very large painting. My interest in the registry was not simply formal. I was moved by the relationship of its intended use and the blank pages. [...] I had seen a room in the Wiesbaden Museum that was seven meters high and had for some time thought how beautiful it was and how much I would like to make a painting there. [...] When I returned to New York I realized that I did not have enough wall space in my studio to make the painting so I began making it in pieces on the floor. I used oil paint, liquid and marble dust to make the painting. [...] Finally I arrived at this wall painting. It manifests the interest I have had in mural art for the past 50 years. It is fitting that this painting relates to Spain since it was there that I first became aware of the potential for a kind of painting that was different from the single rectangle.

D. Novros, Salidas, exh. cat., Wiesbaden: Museum Wiesbaden, 2019, n.p.

Solar Model, 2000

plaster and acrylic
40.6 x 111.8 x 111.8 cm.; 16 x 44 x 44 in.
Photo: Steven Probert
© David Novros / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Also included is a model that anticipates the integration of painting into a purpose built architectural environment, the porcelain, plaster, and acrylic Solar Model (2000). The four sides and open top interior recall an atrium in a Roman house. The interior walls of Romano-Campania houses typically contain wall frescos. Such fresco painting Novros is very familiar with and his ‘portable murals’ relate strongly to this concept of painting as a situated experience or what he calls a ‘painted place’ in the context of his own work.

D. Rhodes, ‘David Novros’, in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2019

https://brooklynrail.org/2019/06/artseen/David-Novros-Paula-Cooper-Gallery-May-11-June-15-2019

Untitled, 1996–2003

1996-2003
oil on plaster on four walls
Boathouse, Middleburgh

David Novros’ wall-paintings are distinguished by an interplay with each place that fundamentally allows this place as such to emerge at all. The interplay itself remains so subtle that at first the space is experienced, and only then, second of all, does the artistic shaping come into view. As if it were self- evident, his painting inserts itself into each architecture. With the history of the fresco in view, Novros casts a contemporary variant that renounces a narrative structure and s shaping according to content, but particularly takes into consideration the historical cohabitation of the genres as an intermeshing of surface and space. Neither the former nor the latter gains the upper hand in doing so. In fact, Novros succeeds in doing something that, at least in his own generation, is peerless.

J. Daur, ‘Wall as painting – painting as wall’, in David Novros, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus, Kleve/ Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2014, pp. 65–66

Untitled, 1995

(circa)
copper, gold mining pans, lead, oil paint
121.9 x 182.9 cm.; 48 x 72 in.
Photo: Steven Probert
© David Novros / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

[The] abstract works [are] made of copper sheeting cut into various shapes, ranging from sharp rectangles to elongated ovals. The overall designs seem inspired by works of ancient art, such as Celtic shields, Native American talismanic objects and pre-Colombian jewellery or weapons. Each piece is painted with touches of blue or black, although the copper color predominates. The artist assembled the pieces at his New Mexico studio and has worked on them for the past decade. Several of the works include metal gold-mining pans several inches deep, soldered onto the copper surfaces.

D. Ebony, ‘David Ebony’s Top Ten’, Artnet, 31 March 2000

Book of studies for fresco at University of Texas Southwest Health Center, Dallas, 1975–1976

1975-1976
watercolour and ink on paper
35.5 x 28.2 x 1.9 cm.; 14 x 11 1/8 x 3⁄4 in.
Dallas Museum of Art, gift of Agnes Gund in honour of Mrs. Eugene McDermott
Image courtesy of Dallas Museum of Art

It was going to the Alhambra that changed my view of what I wanted to be as a painter. Actually, that’s not accurate; it reunited me with my feelings for wall painting ...[it] taught me that painting could be something other than a rectangle hanging on a wall in a museum or gallery, I saw for the first time how a painting didn’t even have to be made of paint.

D. Novros and M. Brennan, ‘Oral History Interview with David Novros’, in Smithsonian Archives of American Art, 22 & 27 October 2008, p. 5

https://www.aaa.si.edu/download_pdf_transcript/ajax?record_id=edanmdm-AAADCD_oh_281973

Untitled (Pennzoil Fresco), 1975

(circa)
fresco
274.3 × 823.6 cm.; 108 × 324 1/4 in.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Pennzoil, 97.716.A-.D
© David Novros / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Photo: Laura N. Wells, © The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

In a 1975 mural commissioned by the Pennzoil corporation for one of their Houston buildings, he adopted a more painterly approach, imparting a sense of the movement of the brush and creating delicate, Rothko-esque shifts of chromatic density.

M. L. Levy, ‘David Novros’s Painted Places,’ in David Novros, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus, Kleve/ Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2014, p. 54

Untitled, 1975

oil on linen
297.8 x 426.7 x 5.1 cm.; 117 1/4 x 168 x 2 in.
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Phyllis C. Wattis Fund for Major Accessions
Photo: Katherine Du Tiel

Novros is not only a great colorist, iterations of shape within composition display an intuitive rather than systematic approach to color in relation to form and surface — these paintings determine an expansion of possibility for painting, and a reconnection with painting within architecture that is apart from tradition of easel painting. It is not the simple object emphasis of some abstract painting or the transfer of a plan to wall, as with Sol Le Witt, or an increase in scale for sublime effects, but a new coexistence of painting with architectural space and, the viewers kinaesthetic experience of movement through that space.

D. Rhodes, ‘David Novros’, in The Brooklyn Rail, June 2019

https://brooklynrail.org/2019/06/artseen/David-Novros-Paula-Cooper-Gallery-May-11-June-15-2019

Untitled, 1973

oil on canvas
213.3 x 274.3 x 228.6 cm.; 84 x 108 x 90 in.
Yale University Art Gallery, Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection

The substance of Novros’ art is not in any single trait or cluster of traits (comparable to Judd’s ‘clarity’ or Newman’s ‘sublimity’). It is in the reconciliation of opposing possibilities for painting: extreme pictorial literalness, on one hand; a richly nuanced illusionism, on the other. These are by no means new possibilities. Nor have they been exhausted. In Novros’ paintings, they engage, undercut, and ultimately renew one another. These works do have an air of renewed possibility, which serves to place them in the present.

C. Ratcliff, ‘David Novros’, in Artforum, October 1976, pp. 63-64

Untitled / 101 Spring Street, 1970

pigments ground in water on a wall made out of sand and calcium carbonate 411.5 × 518.2 cm.; 162 × 204 in.
Donald Judd Foundation, New York

Novros painted the fresco on the building’s second floor, which housed its kitchen and dining area. He studiously followed medieval techniques, first preparing a full-scale cartoon, which he transferred to the wet plaster using the traditional pouncing technique. Working alongside a plasterer, he completed the mural in two days […] Novros incorporated significant portions of untouched plaster into the composition, making the painting appear as if it were somehow emerging from within the architecture. […] In the fresco, Novros expanded his formal vocabulary, creating a syncopated grid of rectangles and squares that he deployed in tandem with his signature right angles.

M. L. Levy, ‘David Novros’s Painted Places’, in David Novros, exh. cat., Museum Kurhaus, Kleve/ Museum Wiesbaden, Wiesbaden; Bielefeld: Kerber, 2014, p. 50

Untitled, 1970

coloured pencil on paper
35.4 x 42.9 cm.; 14 x 16 7/8 in.

Untitled, 1966–2000

1966/2000
acrylic on canvas, white with Murano pink, in 4 panels
approx. overall: 213.4 x 365.8 cm.; 84 x 144 in.
panel 1: 49.2 x 246.4 x 6.4 cm.; 19 3/8 x 97 x 2 1/2 in.
panel 2: 49.5 x 277.5 x 6.4 cm.; 19 1/2 x 109 1/4 x 2 1/2 in.
panel 3: 50.8 x 276.9 x 6.4 cm.; 20 x 109 x 2 1/2 in.
panel 4: 49.5 x 264.2 x 6.4 cm.; 19 1/2 x 104 x 2 1/2 in.
Photo: Steven Probert
© David Novros / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In its pure form, Murano was sold as a powder that could be mixed into a clear lacquer or resin. […] He sprayed multiple layers to form a dense ‘rubbery’ skin that fully concealed the unprimed cotton duck support. He took the additional step of sanding between coats to create a ‘pebbly’ texture that would react strongly with the Murano, which he then sprayed in multiple layers mixed with the untinted version of the same vinyl lacquer. The resulting surfaces underwent striking modulations of hue as the viewer moved laterally across its surface, with different types of Murano producing different color complements.

M. L. Levy, ‘David Novros: Painting in the House of Literalism’, in Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critique, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, p. 110

4:32, 1965

acrylic on canvas
365.8 x 396.2 cm.; 144 x 156 in.
Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin, gift of Lannan Foundation, 1999

My early work is often misunderstood and written about as if it were sculpture. I never had any intention that it should be sculpture- I always thought of it as a way of making paintings, paintings that would be on the wall. I had seen the Matisse paper cutouts in Nice, the Apollo cutouts especially, and I got the idea from that in a way. It was a way of modernizing it, because you could put them up, take them down, move them around. You could use the wall and end up with a mural of some kind...I thought I could do that with canvases, that is why I started making shaped canvasses in separate pieces that could be hung together.

D. Novros and T. Butter, ‘Interview with David Novros – Part 3’, in Whitehot Magazine, August 2009

https://whitehotmagazine.com/articles/with-david-novros-part-3/1934

2:16, 1965

synthetic polymer on canvas
309.8 x 302.6 cm.; 22 x 119 1/8 in.
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C., gift of Walter Hopps, 1973.147A-B

His first exhibition at Park Place Gallery in 1965 found the artist experimenting with a wide variety of silhouettes, several of which appear as sketches in his letters home. These works featured pairs of shaped canvases, in which the units were subjected to rotations and mirror reversals, as well as more complex arrangements of multiple units. His work 2:16 […] prefigured the modular perpendicular forms that would become the preferred idiom for most of his mature work in the sixties and seventies.

M. L. Levy, ‘David Novros: Painting in the House of Literalism’, in Abstract Painting and the Minimalist Critique, Abingdon: Routledge, 2019, p. 100


Unless stated otherwise, all works:
© 2022 David Novros /  © Adagp, Paris, 2022

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