The multifaceted artistic practice of Enrico David (b. 1966, Ancona, Italy) reflects the artist’s sustained inquiry into the anthropoidal form and the expressive potential of material. Over nearly four decades, David has realised a body of work that explores translations and transformations of the body, identity and persona. Interdisciplinary in nature, his practice converses with the language of dramatisation and theatre, drawing on sources that range from visual fragments to literary and filmic references to personal memory, while gesturing toward the applied arts through an exploratory approach to material and form.
David has identified the element of surprise and potential for adaptation as being necessary components of the creative act. He traces this conviction to witnessing his father’s sudden death at 17 – a traumatic event that forced him to contemplate what he understood as the abrupt displacement of consciousness from the body and its inherent absurdity. ‘There is this image of single components of the falling body turned into verb’, he reflects.[1] The recognition of the body as a vessel for the soul in that one, defining moment would significantly shape the preoccupations of David’s artistic practice to come. His move to London from Ancona in the late 1980s at the age of 20, with little knowledge of the English language, would further his thinking around impermanence and adaptation. Once in London, David embarked on a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins – ‘an incredible self-education’[2] - and formative in that it introduced him to the visceral immediacy of German Expressionism.
The artisanal traditions of Italian craftsmanship were rooted in David’s upbringing: his father ran a furniture workshop, while his mother had studied dressmaking. In time, his sister specialised in textile restoration, and his brother mastered leather craftsmanship. ‘Growing up, there was a totally uninhibited relationship to things, to materials’, he recalls. ‘A lot of the solutions that I found in my work came indirectly from misusing the more orthodox ways that all my family members were using […] I tampered with their techniques’.[3] In 1999, David debuted the large-scale embroidered tapestry Stick of Rock at a group exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery. In the work, the silhouette of a figure nods to both home craft and bondage, wherein the non-threatening, domestic quality of pink wool meets with inferences of a latex bodysuit or fetish wear, to ironic effect. An early example of David’s fascination with the tension between identity and performance, Stick of Rock represents the beginning of many interrogations of the self, as the artist has put it: ‘I think these models represent a series of sub-personalities.’[4]
Sharing affinities with the process of working from sketches in artisanal craft, many of David’s sculptures and installations originate in his drawings. A means by which David explores the translation of an image from two-dimensions into three, drawing is both the departure point for, and foundational to, his artistic practice. Life Sentences (2014) for example – a Kafkaesque sculpture featuring a poly-limbed creature clutching a book – is reminiscent of Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated drawn silhouettes. To bring these forms to life, David frequently develops the drawing in modelling wax or clay, later casting them in bronze or polymer plaster, before then adding wood, steel, wool, sponge and other materials. Working alongside a single assistant in his home-based studio, David’s practice is intimate and iterative; moulds used to cast sculptures are frequently repurposed and reconfigured, as can be seen in works such as Racket II (2017) and Putting Up With It (2014), with their pleated or echoing forms.
The pliability of the human form, and David’s exploitation of it, renders work that may be characterised by the deviations of surrealism or the shock of the grotesque. Though the variedness of his work makes the attempt to identify the artist with any single group or movement fruitless, gentle nods to art history help to situate the artist’s more formal concerns. Fortress Shadow (2017), featured in David’s solo presentation at the 2019 Venice Biennale, situates two suspended bodies atop a plinth inspired by the monumental gnomon sundials of the Jantar Mantar observatories in Jaipur and Delhi. Blending the geometric precision of these centuries-old celestial timekeepers with the surrealist overtones of a de Chirico-like set piece, the work dramatises the interval between the two falling bodies. Gradations of Slow Release (2015) is an artwork but also the title of David’s major 2019 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Speaking to the artist’s interest in metamorphosis and ideas of the processual, the work captures a moment where the body appears masticated and in the process of undoing or reconstituting itself. Often moving between genesis and decay, emergence and ossification, David understands the mechanics of transformation as one that reveals the figure’s susceptibility to abstraction. Elsewhere, David uses the semi-abstract language of modernist sculpture to refer to the self in development and its mutable representations. For example, Tools and Toys III (2014), a minimalist metal sculpture, stands as a dedication to the bloom of youth. With its radially splayed rods and lines and a rounded, phallus-like protrusion, the work conjures images of childhood joy and burgeoning sexuality with jocular simplicity.
The staged drama of David’s practice is underscored by the way the artist often describes his works as tools or toys. Reminiscences of childhood surface throughout his installations by way of old photographs, inferences of dolls and playthings, or a deliberate, uncanny infantilism. Untitled (puppets: we are the mods) (2003) is one such example, which, at the same time, invokes another of David’s ‘sub-personalities’: the artist-as-collaborator. The work, a wall-based box made entirely of glass and wood, features a scene with figures playing parts in a band. Returning again to David’s interrogations of performativity and personae, the work was intended to form the basis for a video animation involving puppets bursting into flames, set to a score by Mark Leckey, but was ultimately never completed.
A process involving iteration, translation and transformation, David’s practice parallels a continual personal evolution, a transitional space from which open-ended questions continually surface. Unfolding as a series of interrogations posed to the resilience of the anthropoidal form, David’s primary focus is bodily presence in all its states, as conceptual material in and of itself.
[1] ‘Artist Talk: Enrico David, Destroyed Men Come and Go’, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 11 June 2023
[2] Enrico David, quoted in ‘I think of my sculptures as toy’s – an interview with Enrico David’, Apollo, 25 May 2019
[3] ‘Talk: Enrico David with Michael Darling’, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, 29 September 2018
[4] Enrico David, quoted in ‘Enrico David: Choreography of Man’, MAP Magazine, Winter 2007
