Installation view
David Lloyd
365 A Year of Drawing
January 5 - February 9
Opening Reception: Saturday January 5, 6-8pm
Artist Talk: Saturday January 19, 4-5pm
Klowden Mann is proud to present David Lloyd’s 365 A Year of Drawing, the Los-Angeles based artist’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition consists of 365 mixed-media drawings on paper, spanning the gallery in large clusters according to the date they were made. The show will be on view from January 5th to February 9th, with an opening reception on Saturday January 5th from 6-8pm.
For each day of the 2018 calendar year, Lloyd created one drawing; usually completed in the afternoon, each work was executed on the same spot on his Santa Monica studio wall. Lloyd used social media as a documentation process, with no text or description to accompany the images other than the date. The resulting body of work is one he sees less as a cohesive series, and instead more as a ritualistic meditation on making space for daily creative and intuitive action. As he says, “While there is clearly a connection, I started out the idea that each piece was a brand new drawing… It’s almost the opposite of working on a preconceived project, because here the project is the action of working on a drawing a day and letting those drawings be what they are when made in one go—to not go back.”
The idea for the process came out of Lloyd’s experience with meditation, and his understanding of its insistence on utilizing the discipline of daily action to empty out the internal human dialogue in order to create space to receive. The process also came from personal need: “I have a kind of creative overload that can’t get expressed through planning—maybe it’s kind of attention problem, but it is a need to get what is inside of my head out. And what comes out are I think pretty inventive abstractions. When I work this way, abstraction is what comes out- it’s my natural state.”
That said, the drawings are also referential, frequently looping back to landscape, figure, still life and architecture. Lloyd’s work has consistently ridden the line between categories of abstraction and representation, dismissing purity of form in either realm. Graduating with a BFA from CalArts in 1985, Lloyd was picked up by Margo Leavin Gallery, and became known for a series of intelligent, near-humorous abstractions that quickly entered the market. The visual language he created in the Los Angeles art scene of the 1980’s remained a clear ground for his formal vocabulary, even as he chose to begin incorporating representational imagery—a choice he says he made after the Los Angeles riots in 1992 made him feel that he needed to speak about the world more directly. In the time since he has moved back and forth between these languages fluidly, with signature compositional assurance, anthropomorphic treatment of form, and representational references that exist somewhere between nature and theory.
David Lloyd graduated with a BFA from CalArts in 1985, and began his career with a series of intelligent, near-humorous abstractions, turning towards the incorporation of imagistic referents several years later. He has shown in California at Klowden Mann, Otis College of Arts and Design, Margo Leavin Gallery, Gallery Paule Anglim and the Orange County Museum of Art, along with many others, as well Metro Pictures, and Milk Gallery in New York. His work has been written about extensively, and he is included in the collections of the Orange County Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego and the Getty.