Kessler, David

Biography

David Kessler was born in Park Ridge, New Jersey on September 5, 1950. At the age of two, his family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. His paintings have been exhibited internationally since 1977, with shows in Tokyo, Strasbourg, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Scottsdale, and New York. Kessler’s paintings are in the permanent collections of The Strasbourg Contemporary Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Minnesota Museum of Art, The Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, The Santa Barbara Museum, The Barrington Art Center, and others. Within Arizona, his work is in the collections of The Phoenix Art Museum, The Scottsdale Center for the Arts, The Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona State University Art Museum, and Northern Arizona University Art Museum.

As a painter, David believes that it is important for him to address the concerns of painting – what has been done – and what can he add to this. His work on aluminum is an attempt to use the qualities of refracted light and to have these qualities interact with the painting. The completed image is produced both by refracted light, created by the use of various wire brushes and paint airbrushed in transparent layers. Within this process about half the image is produced by refracted light alone, simulating paint and about half by paint. The dual concerns of working with simulation: refracted light simulating paint, and hybridization: the use of aluminum, wire brushes and paint; are an attempt to create an image working within some kind of context that is post-modern – and he uses that term simply to mean after modern rather than against modern.