David Lindberg

At the very time in the late eighteenth century that lines were being drawn between the fine and applied arts, ‘high art’ itself was yielding to the feminine impulse: to delicacy, sentiment, and, perhaps surprisingly, to an almost domestic practicality in its approach to materials. The fine arts, in fact, had absorbed applied art. And this has remained one of the great yet underestimated conquests for modernity. Materials, for example, took on a new value both in themselves and for their associations.

This might perhaps seem a recipe for simplicity if not for boredom. But what happens in the work of David Lindberg? Complexity on complexity, and anything but boredom. His works, for example, are often seemingly bathed in transparent materials as though to fix their very complexity and allow us to examine them like flies in amber.

But this is a very treacherous transparency for it is in itself part of the complexity of the works. The placing and juxtaposition of the materials is very precise and calculated, though this is the kind of calculation that comes about during the creation of the work and as a result of its very creation, not of pedantic advance-planning, of leaving no room for serendipity. But the transparency shades and blends into all this, and plays a very ambiguous game. On the one hand it is cool and distancing, and yet on the other hand the works are also undeniably beguiling and seductive, even sexual, and this too results from the transparent textures. And it is here that the transparency reveals its treachery or, rather, its double game: for it seems not so much applied to the works as exuded by them. And the result is that such materials as fibreglass or epoxy resin become natural and organic, and the works are almost disconcertingly alive. (see biography)