David Humphrey Is Allergic to Style
The artist challenges the status quo of postmodernism, not by knocking it over but by slyly subverting it.
A few months ago, in the middle of a studio visit with the painter, sculptor, and critic David Humphrey, he showed me a plan on his computer for his upcoming exhibition of works on paper, Anecdote, at Kate Werble Gallery. He explained that he was going to transform the gallery into a room by painting a sofa, plant, cocktail table, standing lamp, and other pieces of furniture and decoration onto the walls.
While Humphrey’s casual, playful setting did not make the actual works on paper better or worse, it did do something unexpected: It made this viewer rethink the paintings I had looked at in his studio, the drawings I had previously seen, and his work as a whole. For most of his career, critics have been perplexed by Humphrey’s work, because here was a postmodern artist who did not fit into any of its well-documented categories. His art did not rely on appropriation, citation, parody, and irony. By focusing on how Humphrey fit into postmodernism, which had started to coalesce by the time he was beginning to exhibit in the late 1970s, critics overlooked that his skepticism, sense of the absurd, and criticism of well-known tropes such as the masculinity of painting, were essential to his approach to art.
