NEW YORK, NY.- Jim Kempner Fine Art is presenting an exhibition of David Mitchell’s most recent photographs on view from May 19th through June 24th. This is the third solo show for the British-born photographer.
As described by Vince Aletti in his 2013 New Yorker article: David Mitchell makes luminous abstractions that look like stained-glass windows designed by a color-field painter. Juxtaposing blocks of hot, cool and sugar-sweet colors (the spectrum veers from fauve to Necco wafer), he makes images that are at once orderly and trippy. The pictures are Mitchell’s attempts to give form to the auras he experiences as a result of left-temporal-lobe epilepsy, and they sometimes appear more atmospheric than solid, as if they were about to evanesce out of their frames.
Rooted in geometric abstraction, David Mitchell continues to translate his visions and aura sensations into color-field imagery. His process is a continued exploration of photographing collages made from a variety of materials, such as fabric, plastic, paper, and tape. The final images undergo multiple exposures, resulting in non-objective compositions that range from soft and ethereal collages to more hard, edged shapes.
The artist’s most recent series, ABC and EMP, represent his slight transition into an abstraction made up of hard, delineated shapes and expanses of color in contrast to the the atmospheric quality of the photographs in his ABQ series from 2015-2017. Both series on view in this exhibition offer black and white palettes, as well as, bold and vibrant color options.
A very successful commercial photographer for many years, Mitchell started to explore the world of fine art after he became ill with Left Temporal Lobe Epilepsy (LTLE). He lost his short term memory, but his long-term memory came to the forefront: images of the modern architectural design of Solarium, a shopping center in the small town in England where he grew up, a concrete sculpture that caught his eye and imagination as a young boy when he and his father went for milkshakes every Saturday, even images from American cartoons from the early 1960s, like Mr. Magoo, that he would watch in his formative years. The shapes, forms, and colors in the photographs currently on display feature elements from these memories.
David Mitchell worked as a fashion photographer for top fashion magazines in London, Florence and Milan in the 1980s. In the 1990s when he moved to Hong Kong, his work expanded commercially, with the addition of clients such as Singapore Airlines, Mercedez-Benz, Sony, Hong Kong Bank and Ericson. His diagnosis of LTLE over a decade ago made it increasingly difficult to work, and ultimately provided the window to self-discovery as a fine artist.
Mitchell’s photographs have been exhibited in galleries in Asia and the United States, and are in many private collections. The artist now lives and works in Bangkok, Thailand.
