David Wightman

David Wightman

British, b. 1980

Contemporary artist David Wightman builds layers of precision-cut wallpaper and paint to create both abstract and landscape paintings in a method similar to marquetry. He has made a career out of the pursuit of hybridity in an attempt to occupy 'the space between abstraction and landscape, high art and low, the home and the gallery.'[1]

Born and raised in Stockport, Wightman studied Fine Art at Middlesex University, and then gained a Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London. Fuelled with references to his own background, Wightman's paintings include 'kitsch' connotations which are imbued with nostalgia. He takes wallpaper, an everyday material, and elevates it in an attempt to make the viewer think differently about it. Wightman admits that the wallpaper has a personal connection, as he grew up in a house papered with 'cheap, but aspirational wallpaper.[2]' Cheap wallpaper reminds Wightman of his past, in the same way that Andy Warhol used tins of Campbell's Soup in his art because he used to eat it every day as a child.

Inspired by Caspar David Freidrich and Ad Reinhardt, Wightman creates his landscape and abstract 'target' paintings using a systematic process that relies on craft and discipline. Every single piece is an individual piece of wallpaper, painstakingly cut with a scalpel and placed side by side, never overlapping. After stretching a canvas, he applies the wallpaper, then sands and primes the piece, ready for painting. The abstract pieces are simpler, with the colours and forms worked out first in small modelli on paper; the landscapes becoming quite complicated with hundreds of pieces of paper. He states wistfully that the process is 'far more labour intensive than the end product suggests.'[3] The imagery used in his landscape paintings seems familiar and beautiful but is in fact banal, for example a mountainscape taken from a chocolate box. He reproduces these in greyscale, rendering them almost 'documentary-like', in order to embrace the colours he does use, which he describes as 'bright and camp' ideals of landscape.

Solo exhibitions include Secret Name at Sumarria Lunn/Art Work Space at the Hempel London (2010), Behemoth and Other New Paintings at the Cornerhouse, London (2009), Aspirations - New Paintings at William Angel Gallery, London (2008) and New Work at Found Gallery, London (2007). Art Fairs include the London Art Fair (2010 and 2011), KIAF - Korea International Art Fair, Seoul, (2010) and the Venice Biennale (2009). He has been shortlisted for the Fringe MK Painting Prize, Milton Keynes (2010), the CUBE Prize, Manchester (2008), the Celeste Art Prize, London (2006) and the Jerwood Artist Platform at the Jerwood Foundation, London (2003). He was a finalist for the Lexmark European Art Prize, London (2003), and winner of the Hunting Art Prizes Young Artist of the Year at the Royal College of Art, London (2003).

He has recently been awarded a six-month residency starting in January 2011 with the Berwick Gymnasium Arts Fellowship in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumberland. The fellowships are offered annually to professional artists who have demonstrated a consistent commitment to their art practice.

Landscape and abstraction intrigue Wightman as genres because they have both fallen out of favour in contemporary art discourse. The strong emphasis on geometry in his work he sees as a 'lament to geometric abstraction'. His playful take on established genres that art criticism has declared as obsolete results in an homage to nostalgia and homeliness. As he puts it, 'my work is an attempt to reclaim abstraction (and landscape) on my own terms.'[4]