College of Charleston SCHOOL OF THE ARTS

Halsey Institute Shows Works by David Stern

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston School of the Arts presents an exciting exhibition, David Stern: The American Years (1995-2008). The opening reception and gallery walk-through will take place on Thursday, Sept. 2. [more info]

The show is comprised of roughly 40 paintings and drawings by Stern, who was born in 1956 and educated in Germany and who has lived in New York City since 1995. As Karen Wilkin (curator of this national traveling exhibition and primary author of the accompanying catalogue) has pointed out, “David Stern’s history as an artist encapsulates, in many ways, the wholly modern notion of the ‘artist without borders’ whose work reflects the multivalent experience of an increasingly globalized world.” His forceful and energetic canvases, covered in inches-thick layers of paint, convey the dizzying, exciting, and sometimes sinister experience of the modern metropolis. Stern has referred to himself as an “action painter,” echoing the artistic legacies of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Yet his captivating human forms—by turns tragic, grotesque, and vulnerable—reach further back to histories of portraiture.