Dave Bopp: Fear of the Invisible

September 7 - October 22, 2022

Preview: September 7th, 4-8pm | Artist Reception: September 14th, 6-8pm

The first pictures taken by the James Webb Space Telescope are truly astounding. These stellar images reveal the depths of the universe that were blurred in comparison with the now outdated technology we relied on before. Not only are we now able to bear witness to the birth of stars, but also the birth of entire galaxies, 13 billion light years away. This is however, only a sliver of what surrounds us, a grain of sand on an endless sandy beach.

This is just to say, what we know is crushed under the weight of what we don’t know and perhaps will never know. Why do I speak of this? To introduce you to the works of Dave Bopp. 

Dave Bopp is a Berlin-based artist whose paintings resemble an oscillating cosmos. Working in layers, Bopp builds his compositions to trigger self-reinforcing tendencies. What he creates he either embraces or abandons; some aspects of the painting are carved to reveal its history while others serve to host thinly sliced geodes which contain entire universes in themselves. 

Abstraction has always been a fickle subject. It is the representation of something that is without representation. The abstraction that Bopp represents is part catalyst who incites the chemistry of movement and part moderator whose hand guides the piece to become part of the conversation. This process is important as his works overwrite each other constantly, intermediate stages are being processed further, thus allowing the sovereignty of his works to stem from their own creation

Bopp’s paintings are of the macro and the micro, they represent entire undiscovered universes outside and inside of us. This ambivalence is what drives the work: what’s within helps to discover the outer, space or self is up to the viewer. As we aspire to push our boundaries higher and higher, we can excite in the discoveries in his explorations.