JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING – MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY (formerly TAYLOE PIGGOTT GALLERY) is pleased to present Brighter Fields, a solo exhibition of work by artist David Abbott, on view June 14th through July 28th, 2024 at the gallery’s downtown location. An opening reception will be held on Friday, June 14th, from 5 to 8pm. All are welcome.
David Abbott works primarily from personal experience, melding visions of the present with his own hazy recollections in order to explore ideas of memory, history, loss, and home. Using landscape as his medium, Abbott is drawn to the cyclical flux of the natural world as an allegory for our own mutable lives. His landscapes at times assert themselves confidently, while at other times appear to be disappearing before our eyes. In a time of massive pressure on the natural world, his landscapes seem to submit both to internal and external forces.
Abbott’s work blends elements of Impressionism and Fauvism with early abstract and modernist ap-proaches, as he focuses on atmosphere, mood, and simplified forms to create quiet and contemplative landscapes in tonal pastel hues. With loose and fluid strokes, Abbott reduces the trees, hills, and fields which inspire him down to more basic forms and patches of soft color, as seen in Blessingcurse (2024). These elements almost melt together as Abbott employs broad strokes and subtle gradients to create a gentle, almost ethereal quality, often creating a sense of mist or haze, suggesting a specific time of day or weather condition. In doing so, he deftly captures the transient effects of light and atmosphere. Abbott’s compositions each have a rhythmic flow, like the rolling hills he so often portrays, with curved lines and overlapping forms that create a sense of depth and movement. Though most of his works focus on the abstraction of landscape, some are concerned with more formal qualities and are far more abstracted. In these works, like Up on Trencrom (2023), he navigates color and form to create dynamic tension. Paired with his use of bold, sweeping strokes, we are left with quietly spirited works that hold a sense of vivacity and movement.
Throughout his oeuvre, Abbott demonstrates a mastery of color, using it both to convey different times of day and atmospheric conditions and as an expressive element. The layering of colors and the inter-play between the darker and lighter areas create a sense of texture and complexity, as tactfully demon-strated in What We Know and What We Don't (2022). These works, which hark back to the landscapes of André Derain, use color to create a nostalgic mood, with palettes often akin to that of film photog-raphy, evoking emotion and memory. Abbott's work awakens real and imagined pasts, while drawing inspiration from time spent outside with birds, woods, and fields that echo with human and wild history, old songs, stories, lives lived, and lost. These are deep, ever-changing landscapes that flicker between recognition and unknowing – composite visions of place, memory, and myth that go beyond the senses.
David Abbott was born in 1981 and grew up in Hertfordshire, UK, before moving to Virginia as a teen-ager, where he attended high school and university. He received his BA in Fine Art from James Madison University in 2004. He then returned to the UK and received his MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England in 2007. Abbott worked as a graphic designer until 2021 when he took up painting full-time. He has shown widely in the UK, Europe, and North America. Today, Abbott lives and works in Bristol, UK.
