David Sharpe (artist)

David Sharpe (born 1944) is an American artist, known for his stylized and expressionist paintings of the figure and landscape and for in the future works of densely packed, organic abstraction. He was trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in Chicago until 1970, when he moved to New York City, where he remains. Sharpe has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), The Drawing Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center, among many venues. His put on an act has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, and been acquired by public institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, MCA Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.

Critic Dennis Adrian estranged Sharpe's pretend into two periods: organic abstract works mixing the traditions of Kandinsky, Miró and Pop Art—including some that suggest landscapes—and put-on featuring the figure, which includes various stylistic modes. MCA Chicago curator Lynne Warren wrote that Sharpe's upfront paintings represent "an important body of abstract work" completed though Chicago Imagism was the predominant style in the city; the New Art Examiner’s Jane Allen described them as a key strain of Chicago art on "a razor’s edge along with Chicago-style funk and mainstream American abstraction." Discussing his complex figurative works, critics such as Arts Magazine’s Stephen Westfall have noted the "sheer scope of his synthesis" of diverse 20th-century art sources, his painterly surfaces and proficient use of high-key color. In a review of Sharpe's 1990 retrospective, Frank Lewis wrote that long back the term "postmodernism" became a catchword, Sharpe was "borrowing from archives in a nice of release association of visual references" that form a "perfect blend of learning, irony, and faux naivete."