Throughout his career, artist Michael David has maintained an interest in visceral materials, potent symbols, and charged subjects, reflecting the personal traumas in his life through artistic transformation. Rather than depicting objects, David’s works directly reflect the viewer via shattered mirror surfaces, inviting contemplation of ourselves.
Career and Artistic Transformation
A pivotal turning point in David’s artistic journey came in 2001, when he was poisoned by overheating encaustic (hot wax) material in his studio, resulting in permanent nerve damage in his legs. Upon returning to painting two years later, he created the “Fallen Toreadors” series, referencing Édouard Manet’s The Dead Toreador. The artist views this series as a biting self-reflection in which he confronted himself.
Earlier works such as Self Portrait as a Golem (1998) and object-like structures coated in pigment and wax (Berlin Gothic, 1981) symbolize David’s evolution from toxic early processes to an art-making practice that nearly cost him his life.
Shattered Mirror and Recreation
The most striking material in David’s recent works is shattered mirrored glass. The artist explains that he creates these patterns by hammering the mirror surface to etch lines. This destructive process recalls lines from William Butler Yeats’s poem “Easter 1916”: “All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.”
Vanitas Series: In pieces like Vanitas and Black Vanitas (2023), David challenges the Baroque still-life genre that symbolizes life’s transience. Instead of drawing skulls, the shattered mirror tasks the viewer with personally reflecting life’s impermanence.
The Bride Stripped Bare (2015–25): David’s most ambitious glass work is a direct nod to Marcel Duchamp’s famous The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass). The piece consists of glass sections shattered in different ways.
David’s use of battered and discarded materials recalls Robert Rauschenberg’s early Combines and the creations of Thornton Dial and Lonnie Holley. Yet without falling into imitation or parody, David references these masterworks while producing something new and necessary without losing his individuality. His art blends pain, anger, and love for others’ works with the ability to hold contradictory perspectives simultaneously.
Yellow Chair Salon and Place in the Art World
Michael David is also the founder and director of Yellow Chair Salon, a virtual program he established during the COVID-19 pandemic, where abstract painter Astrid Dick and the author currently teach. David’s founding of the “Life on Mars” gallery—named after a David Bowie song—stood against the belief that painting was dead once more. The name suggested that painting lives on Mars or that painters are not from this planet.
