Daniel Davidson   Warning Signs 19 May - 19 June, 2006 Gallery 2       click on thumbnails above to see larger images Press Release Pierogi is pleased to present new work by Daniel Davidson. Davidson’s figurative paintings and works on paper reveal a highly subjective fusion of hybrid characters, spaces, and styles. The figures that people his works are often self-portrait caricatures of an infinite variety of possible selves. His goal “is the creation of a meaningful reflection of the emotional states inherent in everyday experience. Often employing the comic or the grotesque, these paintings are multiple and fractured personalities looking for a cobbled identity.” (Davidson) This exhibition includes several paintings that riff on well known historical artworks, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper and Michelangelo’s Pietà. In Davidson’s The Last Summer, he pokes fun simultaneously at the sober idea of a “Last Supper,” rampant American self-indulgence, and himself. With its numerous overweight men stuffing their faces, this painting exhibits more debauched gourmandise than pious reverence, more Hieronymus Bosch than da Vinci. In Davidson’s painting, Mr. Everything Pieta (Just In Case), the Madonna is replaced by a leering, or perhaps dazed, paunchy man sporting Elton John--esque, star-shaped glasses, 7 pills arrayed on his out-stuck tongue, and a variety of tools splayed out around him; from a ladder, to a broom, a machine gun, a baseball bat, and a hobo sack on a stick, an American “everyman’s” everyday tools. In his arms, the Christ figure is replaced by a deflated body wearing army boots and with its head recently ripped off. Also included in this exhibition are a group of Davidson’s recent mirror portraits. Done in watercolor on paper, they are Rorschach-like images—impossibly perfect, symmetric portraits of implausible, imperfect characters, from Mirror (Miner) to Mirror (Spaghetti Hair).
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	P   I   E   R   O   G   I     2   0   0   0 177 north 9th street brooklyn, ny 11211 718.599.2144 noon to 6p friday through monday and by appointment pierogi 2000 is an innovative art gallery in williamsburg, brooklyn, new york