David Roth : Labour and wait

‘Labour and Wait’ is David Roth’s third solo exhibition at Dürst Britt & Mayhew. The exhibition brings together various distinct bodies of work, which continually play with concepts of construction and deconstruction as well as with the performative and sculptural potential painting can possess.

The first room of the gallery is dedicated to Roth’s ‘Ottenstein’ project, which consists of a video and an installation of two canvases primed with glow in the dark paint. These ‘paintings’ served as a raft and a tent during a hike the artist made through the countryside of the Lower Austrian region of Ottenstein. The video documents the arduous and absurd task of dragging two large canvases through the wilderness.

 The second room gives the stage to a series of large ‘Flower Paintings’. The name might suggest demure depictions of flower still lifes, but it actually refers to the technique involved. Instead of using brushes the artist employed real flowers to bring colour and forms to the canvas. This results in dynamic abstract surfaces which have a tinge of action painting in that they show the force of the artist’s bodily movement.

 The final room of the gallery is filled with three brightly coloured sculptures. These sculptures, titled ‘Brains’, nevertheless have all the trappings of a painting: a bearer, colour, and even a wooden framework. The trestles which are supporting the heaps of loose painted textiles are in fact made of modificated stretcher bars. The body of a ‘Brain‘ is made from layer after layer of paintings cut from their frame, fabrics used as a palette or for colour testing, and rags employed to clean brushes or the studio floor.

 The room also contains Roth’s ‘Mud Paintings’ project, consisting of a video and three large canvases painted with mud. In the video we see the canvases hanging from trees in a forest exposed to the weather for a period of eight months and actually becoming part of the environment. We even see animals passing by and having a ‘look’ at the paintings.