Dumas+Limbach is pleased to present “David Surman, L'instinct en surface”, a solo exhibition in our Paris and Saint-Tropez galleries. The exhibition features works by English artist David Surman.
British artist based in London, David Surman (b. 1981) has established himself as a unique voice within the contemporary art scene. He grew up in Barnstaple, a small coastal village in the southwest of England, before moving to a more remote town in the northwest of Scotland, in the wild landscapes of the Western Highlands. Five years passed before Surman set off in search of new horizons. In South Wales, he studied film animation. He later settled in London, in an industrial district where the past of a once-thriving port now coexists with residential buildings and artist studios.
The rural landscapes and wildlife of his childhood thus converge with metropolitan turmoil. Deeply inspired by the expressive painting styles associated with New York, Berlin, and Tokyo, Surman nonetheless retains the rawness and simplicity that marked his early years.
DAVID SURMAN
Portrait of Keith Haring, 2023
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
160 x 140 cm
His pictorial output bears witness to it: David Surman is an artist who succeeds in reconciling dichotomies.
Surman did not follow the traditional path of fine arts training. In the 1990s, he turned to film studies and went on to work in animation, where he began his professional career. From that background, he retains the key principle of the frame. He explains:
“Cinema is about constructing an illusory ‘larger space’ through the accumulation of shots in the viewer’s mind. For me, that experience of cinema clarified the function of painting: to focus on the problem of what is in the painting ; that is, within the rectangle of the canvas and in the totality of its effects.”
This experience cannot be separated from his relationship with contemporary media. In a world saturated with pixels, fragmented narratives, and standardized representations, David Surman paints the way one dreams: intensely, freely, with an anxious tenderness.
DAVID SURMAN
Where have you gone ?, 2023
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
100 x 70 cm
DAVID SURAMN
Nudes Descending a Rockface, 2023
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
160 x 140 cm
He builds a bestiary that is at once intimate, dreamlike, and powerfully symbolic.
Although trained in animation and film, there are no narratives here: his characters are born from a dream, a fleeting moment, an instinctive impulse; they are disguised self-portraits, fragments of soul projected onto the canvas, where the painted matter becomes a record of the gesture.
“It’s a recording of me and my body,” he confides.
The sincerity of his self-portrait speaks to a lived gesture, a memory fixed in time. In this way, his works are as much images as they are experiences : where intuition is paired with deep formal inquiry.
DAVID SURAMN
Portrait of Keith Haring, 2023
Acrylic and charcoal on canvas
160 x 140 cm
“The most important artist of my childhood was my mother, who was a passionate draftsman and sculptor. She made figurative animal sculptures and drawings as well, and has certainly been an influence on me.”
Quotation from David Surman
