Gotham West is a luxury residential building in The New York City neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen. It features several high-end amenities for residents, including a curated rotating art exhibition. Art Assets has curated numerous exhibitions, including the artists Torkil Gudnason, Riitta Ikonen, Jennifer Riley, and Popel Coumou.
The art space is a 45-foot long wall in a large lounge that features a pool table as well as couches and chairs for residents to relax and hang out.
The building is home to individuals and many families with children. To accommodate the varied tastes and ages of all the residents, the work could not feature controversial content or nudity.
Art Assets suggested that playful and optimistic work would be the best fit. After considering a range of colorful abstract paintings, two sets of humorous drawings, and a series of landscape photography, Art Assets and the client decided on the work of David Storey.
Storey’s paintings, begun in acrylic and finished in oil, utilize color to equate humor with profound joy and express big truths without succumbing to pretension. Unusually for a New York painter, misery has been banished from his emotional repertoire—there’s barely a glower in his entire oeuvre. Though his hues can evoke subterranean depths, he invariably surrounds them with a brightness redolent of desert islands.
Immediately after installation, the client advised Art Assets that the work was already turning heads. The Gotham West building also shared the new exhibition on its own social media to much fanfare.
David Storey has been making paintings centered on the fluidly permeable boundaries of image and abstraction since moving to New York from California thirty years ago. Storey brought along a love of picture-making, anecdote, and color that were key elements of the Bay Area regionalism that shaped his work as a young painter. Over the subsequent years, there has been a gradual movement toward a transcendent clarity of the incidental over the anecdotal in both image and in the paint itself. Storey still makes abstract ensembles that function as figurative events and simultaneously occupy an equally nonliteral yet compelling spatial and chromatic arena.
David Storey was born in Madison, WI in 1948, and lives and works in New York City. He earned both a BA and an MFA from the University of California at Davis, graduating in 1972. Storey exhibited with Jay Gorney Modern Art in the mid 1980s and with Hirschl and Adler Modern from 1986 to 1993. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in the United States and abroad. His work is represented in many private, corporate, and public collections, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Boston Museum of Fine Art.
Storey has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship Grant, a New York State Foundation for the Arts Grant, and residency fellowships at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony. He was a 2010 Guggenheim Fellow in Painting. He teaches Painting and Drawing at Fordham University.