Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next

ALUMNI UPDATES

David Shapiro ’01’s Art Ranges from Watercolors to Fluorescents

By Julie Satow ’96, ’01 SIPA

Shapiro and his artwork

David Shapiro ’01 revels in the contradictions between popular culture and high art. His portraits of Paris Hilton, pop icon and heiress, are executed with delicate strokes of pink watercolor that could easily be mistaken for a pencil drawing. He has dubbed a watercolor of actress Angelina Jolie holding her son, who is sporting a Mohawk, “Madonna and Child of the Future.”

Now, he has caught the eye of one of the country’s largest retailers. Shapiro’s image “Lady with a Kinkajou: Paris and Babyluv” earned him a spot in the fall advertising campaign for the Gap clothing chain.

One of six artists and photographers charged with depicting celebrities wearing T-shirts from the fall line, Shapiro painted indie actress Zooey Deschanel in a striped nautical shirt in royal blue. The portrait will be included in a coffee table book that is being published to detail the history of Gap advertising during the past 25 years.

Madonna [Angelina Jolie] and Child of the Future

“I had seen his painting of Paris Hilton and I was taken with his choice of subject and the quality of his draftsmanship,” says James Danziger, the owner of Danziger Projects, which arranged the artists for the Gap advertising campaign. “He is the least well-known and certainly the youngest of all the artists.”

Shapiro, 27, knew he wanted to be a painter at 13. He had his first solo exhibit at 16 and sold out his first show in New York City when he was only 18. The show, a collection of traditional landscapes titled “Graduation,” was at the Eleanor Ettinger Gallery in SoHo.

“My work is a representation of how myths that we thought were discarded are recycled in pop culture, and I’m re­turning these myths to high art,” says Shapiro, who speaks softly, almost timidly, of the theories that drive his work. “I am into using realism in a conceptual way; reflecting how the news processes celebrity culture as a modern pantheon and the third world as a modern underworld. I have been going back and forth, making juxtapositions to reflect this juxtaposition in the news.”

Zooey Deschanel in Shapiro’s Gap ad

After his successful run as a working artist while still in high school in Bethesda, Md., Shapiro let painting take a back seat to his College experience. An art history major, he made the most of Columbia’s location and regularly visited museums and galleries. In his junior and senior years, Shapiro was editor-in-chief of Museo, a journal of contemporary art, and was the curator of several exhibits at the Postscrypt Student Art Gallery. He continued to draw casually, participating in a handful of group shows at the Postscrypt.

Following Columbia, Shapiro entered a Ph.D. program in art history at the CUNY Graduate Center. He started to paint seriously again, and last year left school to pursue art full-time.

Shapiro has been in a number of prestigious shows re­cently, including having several of his watercolors, selected by Carter Foster, curator of drawings at the Whitney Museum, in an offsite show this summer. His watercolors also were featured in “Eastern Boys and Western Girls,” a two-person show last winter at the Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts gallery on West 26th Street.

“His paintings are a comment on advertising and popular culture,” says Althea Viafora-Kress ’00 GS, a host and producer for WPS1 Art Radio, the station for the Museum of Modern Art and P.S. 1. “There are no contour lines with watercolor, so it is a very different visual experience than getting that information through a crass, Photoshopped photo of Angelina Jolie.”

Nobody Leading the People

In addition to watercolors, Shapiro, who lives and paints in a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, works with fluorescent paint that can only be seen with a black light. His piece “Nobody Leading the People,” in blue and black fluo­rescent paint, shows a crowd of men, some masked, running through an alleyway in Haiti. The painting is a reference to the work by Eugene Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People,” a political poster of sorts that hangs in the Louvre and de­picts a half-naked Lady Liberty standing over a crowd of rebels. The painting, along with several other black-light works, was on view last spring in “Dreams of the East,” at Grand Projects in New Haven, Conn.

“I was looking for images that recycled the tropes of past art,” Shapiro says, adding that the knowledge of art history he gained at Columbia has given him an important context in which to place his work.

Lady with a Kinkajou: Paris [Hilton] and Babyluv

Kathleen Cullen, the owner of Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, calls Shapiro “a visual prodigy.” She is organizing a second exhibit of his work, featuring the black-light paintings, for this fall. The dates were not finalized as of publication, but will be posted on Shapiro’s website.

“I don’t believe in irony,” says Shapiro. “If I paint something, I do desire it.” His decision to explore watercolors, long considered a habit of the British leisure class, is part of this desire. That is also why he buys the most expensive art paper on the market. “The painting itself is a luxury good,” he says. “But of course, it is also tongue-in-cheek. There is a level of humor to my work.”

Julie Satow ’96, ’01 SIPA is a reporter at Crain’s New York Business, where she covers real estate and economic development. She has worked for The New York Sun and Institutional Investor and has written for Reuters.

Previous

||

This Issue

||

Next