membership / artist member

David Mabb

download cv here

David Mabb lives and works in London where he is currently Reader in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London.

David Mabb has exhibited internationally and has had twenty-seven solo exhibitions including shows in the UK in London, Manchester and Liverpool; in India in Jaipur and New Delhi; in Canada in Toronto, Oakville, Edmonton, Vancouver, and Windsor; and in the USA, Ireland, Norway and Lithuania. He was Abbey Fellow in Painting at The British School at Rome in 2003 and curated William Morris: “ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich” at the Whitworth Art Gallery in 2004.

His work is in many public collections including the Anokhi Museum of Handprinting, Jaipur; Barts & The London NHS Trust, London; British Council, New Delhi; Delaware Art Museum; National Gallery of Art, Vilnius; National Museum of M. K. Ciurlionis, Kaunas; Oakville Galleries, Ontario; Paisley Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow; Southwark Art Collection, London; St. Lawrence University, New York; University Museums, University of Delaware; Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.

David Mabb has been working with the designs of 19th century designer and socialist William Morris for about ten years. William Morris thought that interior design had a fundamental role to play in the transformation of everyday life.

This essentially political motivation - a commitment to the radical potential of design - is behind much of his work as a designer and craftsman and the setting up of Morris & Co. Morris' designs constituted a radical break with the orthodoxy of neo-Gothic of his time. They are highly schematized representations of nature, where it is always summer and never winter; the plants are always in leaf, often flowering, with their fruits available in abundance, ripe for picking, and with no human labor in sight.

This is a Utopian vision, an image of Cokaygne. Mabb's paintings, photographs, textiles and videos all, in different ways, work with and against Morris' utopian designs by contrasting them with other forms of modernist production, including Malevich, Rodchenko, Stepanova and Popova paintings and designs, modernist architecture and photographs of industry.

Mabb never simply paints or covers over the Morris pattern with another image, elements of the Morris pattern always poke or burst through. This combination produces an unstable picture space that is never fixed, where a Morris pattern and the other image are never able to fully merge or separate.

http://www.artquest.org.uk/artlaw/artlawtv/art-and-appropriation.htm

http://www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/AE/Vol_15/ReadingMatters/Rhythm%2069/index.html

http://www.leokamengallery.com/artists/mabbDavid/mabbArchiveThumb.html

http://www.gold.ac.uk/art/research/staff/dm/01/

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/35371670001/24251648001

• The Hall Of The Modern

  1st October — 23rd November 2003
  The Economist Plaza 25 St. James's Street, London SW1A 1HG