Studio Visit with David Surman
It was such a big pleasure to meet David Surman in his Acme Art studio this week while he is preparing his next solo show, opening in February, at Galería Juan Silió, Madrid.
David Surman (born 1981, UK) lives and works in London. He studied animation filmmaking at the Newport Film School before pursuing a postgraduate degree in film studies at Warwick. After several years spent working in moving image across the UK and Australia, he shifted his focus back to a studio arts practice.
In recent years, Surman has become increasingly interested in the projection of human experience onto the natural world. He employs elements of pathetic fallacy and cartoon form in a calculated way to imbue animal bodies with both sincerity and irony, liveliness and psychology. He also seeks to call into question the hierarchies of taste and value that structure both art and our view of the natural world. Through humour, tenderness and pessimism he shows the condition of precarity shared by all life on our radically changing planet.
Image 1, photo-portrait of David in his studio, sourced from Looking Forward's Instagram
Image 2, David's painting, depicting two dogs barking at each other, whilst crows fly above them
Image 3, David's painting, depicting a group of crows that confusingly overlap, marks of red streak throughout
Image 4, David's painting, depicting a rearing horse, in a pastel landscape with a singular mountain in the distance.
Images sourced from David's Website