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My work exists at the intersection of science and art, and more specifically, the rich and often unsettling territory of medical art. It was my father’s terminal illness that first drew me toward histological imagery and x-ray technology as source material, those clinical, intimate records of a body under siege becoming, for me, a language through which grief and observation could be transformed into something visual and enduring. Over time, this source material became more fluid and expansive, moving freely between painting, sculpture, and installation as the work demanded.
The obsessive quality of my mark-making is rooted in a long background in printmaking, a discipline that instilled in me both a devotion to process and a deep sensitivity to surface. I frequently work with small tools, worn brushes, and salvaged pieces of old cardboard to create stencil effects that echo the intricate, repeating patterns found in cell structure and DNA. Yet these carefully constructed marks are not precious to me — they are made only to be undone, annihilated through subsequent gestural interventions in a process that mirrors the biological rhythms of growth and decay, enlargement and subsidence. The work builds through multiple transparent layers, each decision shaped by the one before it, the process unfolding organically until the piece finds its own conclusion.
More recently, I have begun to flirt with AI technology, though always on my own terms, feeding the system my own drawings and paintings as source material and drawing on medical and scientific terminology to guide the prompts. The results have been genuinely interesting, and not entirely without merit, yet something essential is missing — the tactile quality that is, for me, so fundamental to why making art matters at all. This remains an open question, an avenue that perhaps calls for further exploration, some future melding of the digital and the handmade that I have not yet found. That chapter, it seems, is still to be written.
Born in Wadsworth, Ohio, David Webster earned a BFA from Miami University before completing an MFA at Yale University. From 1975 to 1997, he lived and worked in Paris, France, a formative period of more than two decades that shaped both his practice and his sensibility, and he now resides and works in New York City. His work has been recognised through significant institutional support, including grants from both the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the Ford Foundation.
Webster’s work has been exhibited widely across Europe and North America in a career spanning numerous museum and foundation group shows. In France, his work has been shown at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Hospice Saint-Roch in Issoudun, the Fondation d’Art Contemporain Daniel and Florence Guerlain, the Mona Bismarck Foundation in Paris, the Salon de Montrouge, and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In Germany, his work has been presented at the Museum im Kulturspeicher in Würzburg and the Kunstmuseum Ahlen, while in Italy he has exhibited at Spazio Montenero in Milan.
In the United States, his work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and PS1 in New York, the Katonah Museum of Art, MuseCPMI in New York City, the Center of Photography in Woodstock, the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Baltimore Museum of Contemporary Art, the Pittsburgh Art Center, and the Islip Art Museum.
