SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Haines Gallery presents David Nash - New Work, through December 30, 2004. Internationally renowned artist David Nash presents new sculpture in his fourth major exhibition with Haines Gallery. This exhibition focuses on a few select seminal works such as Star Log, Crack and Warp Wall, and the highly charged and deeply resonant installation piece Black Dome.

As one enters a gallery of Nash's work, the aromatic scent of lime, madrone, beech, maple, and oak provide the first clues of the engagement of the senses the viewer will have with the diversity of this wooden congregation. Nash has the unique ability to identify and release the inherent form and behavior of the unseasoned wood, embracing the element of chance and natural resistance of the wood, as it splits, cracks and warps. What results are pieces formed from a marriage of hand and wood - lending a subtle animated quality to the finished form. Harnessing the elements of air and fire, Nash is also able to reveal color in new ways allowing the natural process of oxidation to alter the color of the wood or juxtaposing a charred surface on red oak. Elegant and seemingly delicate in stance, their grace belies the violence of their creation with chainsaws and fire.

In an interview with Susan Daniel-McElroy, Director of Tate St Ives, Nash explains, "The classic properties of earth, air, fire and water are all present in the growing tree, the tree has to have all four of those elements in order to survive in time and space. So these works emphasize that fact. The drying pieces like Warped and Cracked Column are air pieces. The Black Dome is earth, although it's charred, [it is] re-integrating into the earth element. The earth element is really all about material substance - static. The water element is about movement."

David Nash has a long-standing relationship with the Bay Area, beginning with the patronage and support from the Djerassi Foundation in Woodside, where Nash created his first major site work in a California Redwood grove. His work here has been further facilitated by residency and tutorial workshops with the California College of the Arts, and he has undertaken a number of important commissions in prominent Bay Area collections.