David Clarkson

David Clarkson is a founding member of Canada’s first punk rock band, The Diodes, and was a key participant in the Toronto visual art community of the 1980s. In New York after 1990, he was a regular contributor to Flash Art magazine, and then for many years oversaw exhibition projects at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts. He began teaching at OCAD University in Toronto, after earning an MFA there in 2012. Clarkson’s solo exhibitions include: MoMA PS1, Derek Eller Gallery, and White Columns in New York. His work was in the 18th Sao Paulo Biennial, Brazil, and many other group exhibitions across North America, and Europe. Artist residencies include Fogo Island, Newfoundland; U-Cross, Wyoming; and PS1 International Studio Program, Long Island, New York. His work has been reviewed in Artforum and the New York Times, and featured in many catalogues and books, most recently, Appropriation in Canadian Art, YYZ Books, 2023.

I am a conceptually oriented painter who views contemporary painting as a medium-unspecific discipline. I have prioritized an investigation into allegory, allusion, and certain subjective states in an era of spectacular culture. 

I have developed ways to connect my paintings with digital networks and imaging technologies; often incorporating tropes of landscape painting to visualize contemporary perception and correlated ideas regarding nature, climate and environmentalism. In an often mordantly humorous manner, my work frequently arranges these exterior images to suggest introspective psychological states, and as a journey through inhospitable deserts, searching icy wastelands or labyrinthine caves, and wandering in an obsessive rumination about horror.