The Impurities of Pure Abstraction
about 13 months ago (12/17/2023)
The Impurities of Pure Abstraction Skip to content David Diao, "BN: The Paintings in Scale (Blue)" (1991), acrylic and vinyl on canvas, 78 x 132 inches (all images courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali, New York, photos Zeshan Ahmed) David Diao loves pure abstract painting as embodied by the highly revered work of Barnett Newman and Kasimir Malevich, even as he doubts their claims of attaining the sublime or achieving a utopian, universalist language. After a well-received debut exhibition of abstract paintings at Paula Cooper gallery in 1969, along with work in the 1973 Whitney Biennial, Diao decided to stop exhibiting in the mid-1970s, when high Modernist painting was superseded by Minimalism and Conceptual Art. To me, Diao’s withdrawal from the art world — and reentry in the mid-1980s, with conceptually rigorous works that explored high-Modernist painting’s contradictory legacies — indicates his desire to investigate painting’s multiple, competing identities.