David Flemming Sharpe

David Sharpe (born 1944) is an American artist, known for his stylized and expressionist paintings of the figure and landscape and for early works of densely packed, organic abstraction. He was trained at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and worked in Chicago until 1970, when he moved to New York City, where he remains. Sharpe has exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), The Drawing Center, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art, and Chicago Cultural Center, among many venues. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, ARTnews, Arts Magazine, New Art Examiner, the New York Times, and the Chicago Tribune, and been acquired by public institutions such as the Art Institute of Chicago, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, MCA Chicago, Smart Museum of Art, and Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, among many.

Critic Dennis Adrian divided Sharpe's work into two periods: organic abstract works mixing the traditions of Kandinsky, Miró and Pop Art—including some that suggest landscapes—and work featuring the figure, which includes various stylistic modes. Discussing his later figurative works, critics such as Arts Magazine’s Stephen Westfall have noted the "sheer scope of his synthesis" of diverse 20th-century art sources, his painterly surfaces and skilled use of high-key color. In a review of Sharpe's 1990 retrospective, Frank Lewis wrote that long before the term "postmodernism" became a catchword, Sharpe was "borrowing from history in a kind of free association of visual references" that form a "perfect mix of learning, irony, and faux naivete."

Life and career Sharpe was born in 1944 in Owensboro, Kentucky. He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 1966; MFA, 1968) with professors including Whitney Halstead and Ray Yoshida, at a time of artistic ferment during which the Hairy Who and Chicago Imagism first emerged, a formative period that permanently influenced his work.

Sharpe has been married to his wife, painter Anne Abrons, since 1979. They have two children and two grandchildren. Paintings such as Three (1970, above) combined overlapping colored and patterned biomorphic and abstract shapes that critics wrote, exploded across the canvas before being contained at the edges with a single-colored ground. Allen identified Sharpe as a key proponent of one strain of Chicago art: an organic blend of Imagism and mainstream American abstraction; Less contained than his earlier works and lacking a single focal point, these still-complex compositions featured a patchwork of vignettes spread laterally across formats that were unified by color and rhythm.

Based on drawings representing Sharpe's experience of the midwestern American landscape, or the pastoral Bathers (1982), employed diverse art historical allusions: the interiors of Matisse; the distorted anatomies of Cubism and unschooled art; the odalisques of Ingres, Delacroix and Manet and monumental male bathers of Picasso; and the high-pitched color and extreme angularity of Imagism.

David Sharpe, 10/9/15, oil on canvas, 24" x 20," 2015.Critical opinion was at first mixed. Some critics felt that the landscapes suffered when figures were introduced Depicted in a "faux naif" style, with typically complex, frieze-like compositions referencing Poussin, Millet and 17th-century Dutch genre painters, these paintings were considered some of the most satisfying Sharpe had created. and returned to the markmaking of his 1970s landscapes in "Neo-Fauvist" portraits of himself and his wife, Anne. Generally frontal and focused on expressionistically distorted heads, the portraits evoked Picasso in their poses and dislocations, and Matisse in color and the interior settings. Critic Margaret Hawkins and others have described his later figurative interiors (e.g., 10/9/15, 2015), as having an almost violent, "scratchy immediacy" that creates psychological tension in otherwise serene domestic settings. Alan Artner considered them among the freest, most childlike passages in Sharpe's work, despite the frenzied markmaking.

Collections and recognition Sharpe's work resides in numerous public collections, including those of the: Art Institute of Chicago, among many.