American painter
David Stern is a German-born American figurative painter, whose work is rooted in the European figurative art tradition and informed by American Abstract Expressionism. The main theme/motive of Stern's work is the human condition. He works almost exclusively from memory and his accumulated knowledge of the human figure. All of Stern's paintings are done with self-made mixtures of pure pigment and linseed oil. Since 2019 he has changed his practice and uses acrylic binder as a medium for his pigments.
Biography.
David Stern was born on February 3, 1956, in Essen, West Germany and lives in New York City. Stern has referred to himself as an “action painter,” echoing the artistic legacies of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Yet his human forms reach further back to histories of portraiture.
After an apprenticeship as a sign painter Stern attended the Dortmund Fachhochschule für Design and Art (1975–79) and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1980–82). He then taught painting at the Dortmund Fachhochschule für Design and Art, while he developed his painting skills living in a village near the town of Münster. In 1986 he moved to Cologne, where he found his artistic voice. From 1987 on, Stern exhibited his work nationally and quickly entered the international scene in the early nineties, with shows in Austria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Belgium and Great Britain. Stern's 1992 retrospective exhibition "David Stern: Study for a Way" at the Hungarian National Gallery in Budapest was the first exhibition by a contemporary Western artist after Hungary opened to the West.
In 1993, Stern showed his work in the US for the first time, immigrated in 1994 and became naturalized in 2000.
Since his arrival, he has been fascinated by his encounters with an intensely urban place defined by its energy, crowding, speed and cosmopolitism. His national traveling exhibition "David Stern: The American Years (1995–2008)" curated by Karen Wilkin, demonstrates shifts in form and content in Stern's work since the artist moved to New York from Germany in 1995.
Stern has exhibited widely in New York City, the US and Europe.
His work can be found in public and private collections in the United States, Europe and Asia, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Kupferstichkabinett Dresden (Dresden, Germany), National Museum (Poznan, Poland), Dresdner Bank (Cologne, Germany), Kunstsammlung der Universität Göttingen (Göttingen, Germany), Arkansas Art Center (Little Rock), Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville (Jacksonville, Florida), John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art (Sarasota, Florida), and the National September 11 Memorial &amp; Museum (New York).
September 11, 2001.
Stern's paintings "The Gatherings" are powerful monuments of collective mourning after the events of September 11, 2001. The paintings are in the collection of the National September 11 Memorial &amp; Museum in New York.
Portraits.
Throughout his career David Stern has created portraits - always self-portraits and portraits of those close to him - and always in the same close to life size - based on drawings that the model sits for. In addition to portraits of family members, he painted portraits of friends like the philosophers Günther Anders (1986/90) and Abraham Ehrlich (1990), the saxophonist Matze Schubert (1988), the artists Emil B. Hartwig (1990), Al Hansen (1993), Marvin Hayes and Frank Bara (2001/02) and William Wegman (2008), the football player Willis Crenshaw, the diplomats Berel Rodal (2002/03) and Ronald Fagan (1999), the author, screenwriter and poet Jeremy Larner (1999) the actress and therapist Doe Lang (2011/12), or the art critic and curator Karen Wilkin (1999).
Digital Drawings.
Stern has been involved with digital drawings since the first drawing apps for the iPhone came on the market. His thoughts about the nature and practice of digital drawings were published in 2013.
In the same year, Stern published the artist book “heros and graces,” 21 years after he published “the erotic nature of truth” with the philosopher Abraham Ehrlich (among others in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art). It is a meditation on gender and based on a number of touch screen drawings.
Works on Canvas and on Paper.
Stern's work is and has always been figurative, using the universal experience of the visual world as a point of reference. The paintings are developed in a process of action and reaction, without a preconceived plan and/or image of a desired result. 
The themes of David Stern's works are always connected to his own experience and observation. He works almost exclusively from memory and his accumulated knowledge of the human figure. All of Stern's paintings are done with self-made mixtures of pure pigments and linseed oil. Since 2019, he uses acrylic binder as a medium for his pigments.
"I regard my paintings as innumerably different shaped vessels, which contents are according to the observing individual's experience (including myself). The content will have to take on the shape of the vessel, eventually." (David Stern, 2011)
Stern's works At the Gates are about the Threshold to the Unknown - Meditations about the Foreign.
Art historian Elizabeth Berkowitz speaks with David Stern about his series "At the Gates" on August 4, 2020.
The paintings The Sons of God refer to a rather strange verse in Genesis 6/6: 
 “The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward when the sons of God would consort with the daughters of man, who would bear to them. They were the mighty, who, from old, were men of devastation.”
The motive of the falling man has interested him for a long time, having seen Max Beckmann's “Der Stürzende” as a young man. In the 1980s, he worked on some paintings with that theme, but deemed them unsuccessful and subsequently destroyed them.
Art historian Eckhart Gillen speaks with David Stern about his series "The Sons of God" on December 17, 2020. German language.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Stern created self-portraits in small format, at home as well as in the studio, in ink (mostly fountain pen) on paper, some washes and Japanese ink. All drawings measure 11 1/2 by 8 inches.
Selected exhibitions.
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
References.
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