“The Unseen Ceremony” represents perhaps the most important body of work to date by one of the United States’ most promising young artists. This exhibition at Turner Carroll Gallery is the only exhibition of Linn’s paintings outside of a museum venue for the entire year of 2003. This exhibition marks an incredible opportunity for Santa Feans/art lovers to see Linn’s paintings first hand, and we sincerely hope you will help make them aware of this special opportunity.
Some of the finest museums in the country are exhibiting David Linn’s paintings. In the last three years alone, his work has been the subject of several solo museum exhibitions across the United States, and his paintings have been included in some landmark exhibitions such as “Representing Representation”–one of the finest exhibitions of representational artwork in the country–at the Arnot Museum of Art in New York. Perhaps the reason so many museums are clamoring to exhibit David’s work is the astounding and rare level of quality, technique, and vision his paintings possess.
Part of the importance as well as the appeal of Linn’s paintings lies in their distillation of color and composition. Linn has refined his palette to the point that it is devoid of color distractions. As in a dream, he simplifies the color to sepia/monochrome. By removing the color distraction, Linn provides an environment which elevates the subject he depicts to the realm of the sacred.
In this exhibition “The Unseen Ceremony,” the subjects of the paintings are the human figure and the landscape. For Linn “the unseen ceremony” is the act of our simply living our lives in a manner that is conscious and aware enough to take in the painfully beautiful act of living, breathing, relating to each other, our passage toward death, and the preciousness of the natural world in which our lives are lived .
The events one tends to notice and remember in life are the extremes–the shocking, happy, traumatic. But what Linn attempts to show with his paintings is that even the most ordinary subject–a piece of cloth, for instance, in his “The Unseen Offering;” a cloud in “Terrain #3,” or the most ordinary act, such as touching one’s face in “Preparing #2” can be seen as the most utterly exquisite thing in the universe, if we are only aware enough to see so.
David Linn is a profoundly important artist of our time.