David Ostrowski
“Parliament”
New York, 22 East 80th Street, 2nd Floor
In David Ostrowski’s paintings, minimal gestures create maximum tension. His spraypainted lines break apart monochromatic backgrounds, both emphasizing and negating the painting’s flatness. Surfaces sometimes built from plain house paint reveal underlayers of studio detritus that complicate the presumed emptiness of his abstract compositions. Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present Parliament, Ostrowski’s first exhibition at the New York gallery, which furthers the artist’s relentless questioning of the medium of painting and its constitutive elements via the recurring figure of the owl.
Ostrowski’s first owl paintings date back to 2009, but he did not exhibit them until 2019. Now, five years later, Parliament combines early examples with several new works of varying scales and dispositions. Among backdrops of off-white and dusky blue, one, two, three or many owls appear, rendered in an array of visual styles from realistic to painterly to pictographic to cartoonish. Because of Ostrowski’s deft play with layering, overpainting and placement, they seem variously to be affixed to the work like a collage, or to emerge from the background, always bringing attention back to the painting’s surface. Certain canvases contain only a fragment of the animal, where others are nearly filled with them. Owls are creatures endowed by humans with a long list of spiritual and symbolic attributes; they are said to be wise, melancholic, mystical, ominous. Yet, though owls are undeniably figurative, Ostrowski approaches them like he does his abstractions: as pure shape and form that coalesce through line, gesture and color. By continuously repeating them, often in humorous positions and attitudes, Ostrowski demystifies the owls, as he noted in Mousse in 2019: “The symbolism of the bird of wisdom, the allegory of good and evil—I want to dismantle these things.” His repetitions likewise empty the figurative form of its meaning, calling into question how images are conceived and understood.
Cover Image: David Ostrowski, Einkommensteuer (Parliament Paintings), 2023, acrylic, lacquer and cotton on canvas, wood, 101 x 71 cm, Courtesy David Ostrowski and Sprüth Magers
