Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, painting, video
Website: davidmaisel.com
David Maisel was born in 1961 in New York City and lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BA from Princeton University and his MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, with additional graduate study at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is represented by Haines Gallery in San Francisco and Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York. His work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Library of Congress, LACMA, SFMOMA, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and Yale University Art Gallery, among many others. His photographs are the subject of seven monographs published by Steidl, Nazraeli Press, Radius Books, and Ivorypress. He was a Scholar in Residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2007 and an Artist in Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2008. His awards include a 2018 Guggenheim Fellowship, an Individual Artist’s Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a short-listing for the Prix Pictet in 2008.
Maisel works in aerial photography, video, and — more recently — abstract painting, across three decades addressing the aesthetics and politics of radically human-altered environments. His aerial photographs of mines, military testing grounds, salt lakes, and urban sprawl are at once vertiginous and painterly — images that function as evidence of environmental devastation while also possessing the visual allure of color field painting. His core series, Black Maps, has accumulated images from open-pit mines, defoliated forests, water reclamation zones, and military testing sites across the American West and beyond. His Library of Dust series (2005–06) documented corroded copper canisters from an abandoned Oregon psychiatric hospital — each containing the unclaimed cremated remains of former patients — an intimate counterpoint to the aerial grandeur. His most recent abstract paintings respond to catastrophic climate events: wildfire, flood, and drought rendered in pours, stains, and brushstrokes that hover between beauty and emergency.
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