Improvisation - Beyond Reality

This show continues David Frazer's decades-long practice of improvisational painting, encouraging accidents and making sense of the unknown as he goes. The complex and dense paintings embody his signature style, utilizing familiar motifs in an abstracted and evocative manner. Frazer’s working process is inspired by a broad range of historical artistic practices, including collage and abstract expressionism, traditional Chinese ink painting, and Flemish and Italian Renaissance painting, especially the work of Hugo van der Goes, Piero della Francesca, and Giotto. He views abstraction as a process-based practice in which he creates an eclectic series of images and “languages” that work together to form a sense of harmonious continuity. Although his paintings include familiar objects like flowers, eggs, birds, and apples, this imagery is not meant to be viewed as literal or narrative elements. Rather, they act as harbingers of metaphorical meaning, loosely evoking themes of vulnerability, birth, love, risk, loss, sin, beauty, and currency. Together, these images blur the line between objective and nonobjective painting traditions, creating a unique expressive mood that the artist considers “visual poetry.”