Auteur/autrice : admin

American, born 1953 in Chappaqua, New York.
Lives and works between New York and Fontainebleau, France.

David Loeb’s mother and her identical twin were painters and he has been painting since childhood.

He studied with Gillian Pederson-Krag at Cornell University; Reed Kay at Boston University; Louis Finkelstein, Wolf Kahn and Philip Guston at the Yale Summer School of Art and Music. He attended graduate school at Indiana University, Bloomington, where he studied with Robert Barnes and Richard Ryan.
 

In 1985, Loeb was awarded a Fulbright grant to study Chartres cathedral and Père Lachaise cemetery.

In 1993, he received a Krasner-Pollock Foundation Grant. He has taught at the New York Academy of Art Graduate School and at Parsons School of Design in Paris.

Since the beginning of his career in the 1970’s Loeb has concentrated mainly on three painterly genres – still life, portraiture and landscape – and on a fourth genre, a form of allegorical painting rooted in late 19th century Symbolism.

Loeb’s still lives are based on careful geometric compositions with an exquisite sensitivity to light. They are intimate paintings set in the meditative space of the artist’s studio. They explore a great variety of objects, surfaces and materials to perfection: fabric, porcelain, metal, flower petals, leaves, stones, fish scales and feathers. The choice of the objects and their shapes, some seemingly male, others female, reveal, beyond the beauty of the surfaces and colors, a symbolic theatre in which hidden meanings and moods invest the various objects as if they were actors on a painterly stage. This symbolic quality makes the still lives come alive as mysterious presences. The artist says about them: « The seemingly-predictable convention of flower-painting is a foil, hiding a less-expected world of paradox and metaphor. The paintings explore the fleeting boundary between the material and the immaterial, between concrete density of form and the weightlessness of light and space.”

His technique in pastel is particularly impressive. A medium which is seldom used in contemporary art, pastel allows for a special delicacy in the rendering of light and confers on the still lives a soft powdery glow which accentuates their oniric quality.
A genuine emotional sensibility combined with a rigorous style make this group of paintings an altogether exceptional ensemble. In the current show at Jennifer Norback Fine Art, Loeb’s art has reached a new level of depth and maturity that reflect the artist’s age, experience and true painterly commitment.

website : http://www.davidloebpaintings.com