SANTA MONICA, CA.- The Santa Monica Museum of Art presents Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings (on view through April 16, 2011), the first museum exhibition for this young, up-and-coming artist. SMMoA consistently premieres the work of artists who have gone on to make important contributions in contemporary art, including Brody Condon, Urs Fischer, Rebecca Morris, Joel Morrison, and Henry Taylor.

The exhibition runs in Project Room 2 concurrently with Al Taylor: Wire Instruments and Pet Stains, the first American museum survey of work by this important and prolific artist, and in Project Room 1, The Donkey Show.

Cummings (b. 1980) is a graduate of the MFA program in sculpture at UCLA, where he transferred his interest in 3-dimensional objects to painting. His abstract work plays with space and color in a variety of scales. Deceptively simple at first glance, his paintings are in fact, meticulously structured and complex formal compositions.

Daniel Cummings: Recent Paintings features six new works that investigate surface and pictorial depth, as well as the space between abstraction and figuration. In works like Metro, figures seem to emerge from shadowy environments, eluding to deep space and movement. Works like Untitled—with its central, ghostly, soft pink blur placed on background shapes in orange, blue, white, and black—deftly combine loose and semi-transparent washes with carefully wrought pictorial structure.

Born in Pittsburgh, Cummings lives and works in Los Angeles.