DFN Gallery will hold an opening reception for the artist David Mahler on Thursday, June 10th, from 6 to 8 PM, in the lobby of The Wall Street Journal Building, 1155 Avenue of the Americas, between 44th and 45th Streets, New York, NY.

Unfinished Past, a selection of landscape paintings by New York artist David Mahler spans a ten year period and shows an intriguing variety of image making approaches. Some are finely rendered, seamlessly painted images, but Mahler expands our understanding of the traditional genre by “showing the seams” with his loosely painted, rough textured mixed media paintings of ruins, trees, skies and water.

“My landscape painting is an expression of my regard for the poetry of the visible natural world. This awareness of how the forms in nature may be synthesized with the schematic vocabulary of painting informs my practice. In the paintings of John Constable and Jacob van Ruisdael, I find the classical formal models that serve as templates for reading order into the random events of nature. My subjects (skies, water, bridges, etc.) appeal to a preference for a dynamic movement which invests the painting with life. I have expanded my vocabulary by combining media, such as photography, shellac, water, and oil paint, finding forms in random marks and paint effects and exploiting aggressive texture as a foil to pictorial illusion. I find that these techniques expand the dimensions of sensation and potential meaning within an otherwise traditional genre of landscape. This unmethodical working process is a catalyst for surprise and ambiguity, a source of non-literal communication whereby an undefined outcome leads to a discovery of new forms. Contemporary interpretation creates new meaning out of past art by expanding on the old forms. Art may be enlivened by building on tradition. The past is unfinished.” David Mahler, 2010