RESUME
…a nuanced, hybrid practice: socially responsive but not subsumed; collaborative but not complacent; formally strong and institutionally strategic. The work avoids the pitfalls of fetishistic participation or bland public decoration, offering instead a balanced model of socially engaged art that is formally robust, critically aware, and institutionally informed.
“To explore how art can shape and narrate social and spatial contexts by weaving together theory, materiality, and collaborative practice.”
This work also resists traditional structure and coherence, favouring instead an informal, process-driven approach where conventional order and artistic hierarchy are absent. Instead, it embraces a raw, experimental mode of creation using everyday materials and actions—cutting, folding, stacking—blurring boundaries between painting and sculpture, skilled and unskilled labour, and finished and unfinished states. It becomes a record of gesture, thought, and making—a provisional archive of spontaneous, physical experimentation rather than a resolved, singular artwork.
RECENT
Working Material
PDF: www.davidpatten.co.uk 12.01.2020
11.11.2025 | Comment: Scheduled Monument 1017585, 1927
Manduessedum Roman villa and settlement with associated industrial complex
a small horse, pony + a chariot + a city; an old fortification; a Roman site
“The final battle of the rebel queen of the Britons Boudica at the Battle of Watling Street in AD 60/61 may have taken place near Manduessedum.”
17.06.2025
01.08.2025
15.07.2025 | “a field that refuses to resolve…as if the painting were only a fragment…”
08.07.2025
03.07.2025
28.06.2025
…assemblages involving painted surfaces, metal, printed matter, and torn textures / layered, scraped, and built up with intentional surface disruption, giving a tactile, almost sculptural presence / highly tactile / thickly and scraped…with peeling, scratching, and layering, indicating a deliberate process of construction and deconstruction / abstraction practice.
31.12.2024 | Text 37. 24 / 25 | Working Notes
“…we are in a reality which offers us meanings, a horizon of meanings which arrive after the destruction of the market that the sublime has permitted us.”
– Antonio Negri: ‘Letter to Manfredo on Collective Work’ in ‘Art et multitude’, Polity Press, 2011, 39
2025 | Collage & Text
25.03.2025
Text: “the shrieking condemnation, by the tearing gesture itself, of any authorial posturing | artistic agency / what does it mean to be an artistic subject, an author”
18.06.2025
24.11.2025
Text: “ordinary techniques produced a fragile, improvised object / the selection and inventive manipulation of unlikely, preformed elements / physical (nontranscendent) acts such as cutting and folding paper substitute for traditional drawing / subvert / exchange of the codes of painting and sculpture / a mingling of optical and haptic modes / in the gap between de-skilled labor (which might be carried out by anyone) and highly skilled, “immaterial” labor that preserves a sense of artistic spontaneity in its messy, inefficient facture.”
…a stack of art papers or sketchbook pages, likely from an artist’s studio or personal archive / informal and process-oriented, suggesting a work-in-progress or archival collection of creative experiments / paint smudges and creases imply it was used practically, not preserved for presentation / studio practice — informal, raw, and rich with process / [evoking] the gestural, intuitive aspects of art-making / a process archive, sketch dump, or a “working pile” that reflects thinking-through-doing / traces of gesture, decision, and experimentation / remnants or tools of making / not a single artwork.
05.05.2025 | Floriana
29.05.2025 | Hans Brill
Pieter Bruegel the Elder: ‘Mountain Landscape with River and Travellers’, 1553, British Museum / Hans Brill, librarian, art teacher and naval commander, born May 17 1930; died July 24 2001.
02.12.2024 | Text
21.11.2024 | Text
HA HA Reinhardt | “How to Look at a Cubist Painting”
09.11.2024 | Statement
FRAMING / FRAGMENT / FABRICATION
28.09 & 01.10.2024 | Barnett Newman / ‘Stations’ (Washington DC)
04.10.2022 & 04.10.2024 | Reinhardt
New York | Day #6 / 11.00am Friday 23 September 2022, Judd 101 Spring Street NYC
Ad Reinhardt: Abstract Painting, Red, 1952, Oil on canvas, 63 × 43 inches (160 × 109.2 cm)
Richmond | Day #12 / Friday 4 October 2024, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
Ad Reinhardt: Red Painting, 1952, oil on canvas, Gift of Sydney and Frances Lewis (85.434) (152.4 × 208.28 cm)
“An artist who dedicates his life to art, burdens his art with his life, and his life with his art.”
— Ad Reinhardt
Sydney and Frances Lewis “…bartered with their company’s products for art, giving artists refrigerators, hair dryers, and lawn mowers, and also allowed the artist’s works to decorate Best Company offices and showrooms.”
“There is no such thing as a good painting about something.”
— Ad Reinhardt
[VMFA Gallery label] Red Painting is one of the first in which Reinhardt made geometry and color the focus, eliminating all traces of brushwork. Emotion and narrative are referenced through chromatic intersections of hue and value. Reinhardt’s spare, nearly monochromatic works paved the way for both the color field painters later in the decade and the minimalists of the 1960s.
14.08.2024 | Amsterdam
12.06.2025 | Amsterdam 2024 & Braque: ‘Duo pour flûte’, 1913–14, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
22.03.2024 | Baskerville
“Very much in Baskerville’s footsteps, we are disregarding disciplinary boundaries between art and craft, humanities and sciences. / Baskerville’s master punches are the only evidence we have of his workshop. Yet hidden within those punches are the clues to their manufacture.”
LINK: Birmingham City University
10.04.2023 | Baskerville
Ben Waddington (author), Janet Hart (photographer): ‘111 Places In Birmingham That You Shouldn’t Miss’, Emons Verlag, 10 April 2023
Facebook [27.09.2023]: here
Facebook [26.10.2023]: here:
24.04.2020 | Working Note
David Patten 