About the work

The starting point of my work has been a certain devotion to the lineage of abstraction as developed in high modernism. But unlike the formalist use of abstraction, I employ these forms to the specific tasks of troubling the history of modernism itself, and also my own personal history of over forty years as an artist. The earliest works from the late-1960s onward were referred to as the formalist abstraction of the postwar New York School. In the mid-1980s, with an assist from the debates around appropriation, I dove back into the European avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s. This, and my observations of the art world, led me into analysing the mechanism of how art history is written and value consigned. But this is done by painting as I am a painter and not anything else.

For Scale Sake depicts the chair Robert Motherwell used in many photographic reproductions of his paintings, for scale sake. I have isolated the chair in the corner of a blue monochrome background, elevating it to become a metaphor for art history and the positions artists are assigned according to maket value.

-David Diao

About the artist

DAVID DIAO is an artist who began making paintings in 1964, nine years after moving to New York from Hong Kong. His work is devoted to the lineage of abstraction and is grounded in his personal history as an immigrant of Chinese heritage. His works riff on famous Modernist paintings and borrow images and motifs from works by artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Kasimir Malevich, and Barnett Newman. He uses catalogues, archival photographs, and ephemera as points of reference. The works are both tributes to, and interrogations of, the subject-artists' careers.
Since 1969, Diao has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery and Leo Castelli Gallery, and solo and group exhibitions at galleries like Office Baroque, Brussels and Antwerp; Postmasters Gallery, New York; Tanya Leighton Gallery, Berlin and ShanghArt Gallery, Shanghai.
He had institutional exhibitions at M+ Museum, Hong Kong; Consortium Museum, Dijon, France, Fundacion Santander, Madrid, Spain, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Arts Club of Chicago; MC Contemporary, Madrid; the Musée d'Art Moderne in Saint Etienne, France; the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Connecticut. 

In 2014, the University of Strasbourg hosted a colloquium on his work with a dozen papers presented by various art critics and historians. In 2015 the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing hosted a large retrospective of Diao which included 125 paintings.

Diao's work is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Akron Museum in Ohio, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Blanton Museum at University of Texas at Austin, The Brittany Regional Contemporary Art Fund in France, the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, and the Vancouver Art Gallery.

More work by David Diao