White Cube is pleased to announce representation of London-based Italian artist Enrico David (b. 1966, Ancona, Italy), in collaboration with Michael Werner Gallery.
David’s first exhibition with the gallery will open in October 2025 at White Cube Paris, coinciding with a retrospective at Castello di Rivoli, Italy (29 October 2025 – 22 March 2026). The artist’s paintings Sofia I and Study for a Bust I (both 2024), along with his sculpture Fortress Shadow (2017), will be on view at White Cube’s booth during Art Basel Hong Kong (28–30 March 2025, booth 1C23).
Over nearly four decades, David has developed a distinctive visual lexicon that delves into the translations and transformations of the body, investigating its myriad manifestations through an exploratory approach to material and form.
He has exhibited at prestigious institutions worldwide, including major retrospectives at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois (2018), and the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC (2019). That same year, he was selected as one of three artists to represent Italy at the 58th Venice Biennale.
Influenced by the language of dramatisation and theatre, David’s multifaceted practice – which spans painting, sculpture, tapestry and installation – draws from a variety of sources, including visual fragments, literary, filmic and art historical references, as well as personal memory.
Born into a family of artisans, David moved to London in the late 1980s where he pursued a BA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. The influence of design and craftsmanship permeates his work, and in 1999, he made his debut in a group exhibition at Saatchi Gallery with a series of large-scale embroidered tapestries inspired by fashion photography. Among them, Stick of Rock (1999) presents the silhouette of a figure that subtly nods to both home craft and bondage, where the domestic quality of pink wool meets with inferences of a latex bodysuit or fetish wear. An early example of David’s fascination with the tension between identity and performance, the work represents the beginning of his ongoing interrogation of the self.
Characterised by the deviations of surrealism or the shock of the grotesque, many of David’s sculptures and installations originate in his drawings. He develops these forms in modelling wax or clay, later casting them in bronze or polymer plaster, before then adding wood, steel, wool, sponge and other materials.
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.
