Bruno David Gallery is showing This or That, an exhibition of new paintings, monoprints, and watercolors by Carmon Colangelo. Carmon Colangelo intervenes on the modern. Gestural abstraction, informal geometries, diaristic ephemera, surrealist afterimages, and architectonic montage all inform his work. He fills work with happenstance, surfing through printmaking, drawing, painting, and digital media to reconsider a principal birthright of the avant-garde - that of presence – alive in the utopic fixations of art and industry. He humanizes technology by modifying surplus mechanisms, teasing out aesthetics dormant in discarded details. Rejuvenating apparatuses and their prior utility, he critiques design histories at variance with nature and simultaneity.

His newest work stems from hundreds of drawings and watercolors along with shaped free-form dimensional canvas works and folded paper sculptures made in response to social distancing, remoteness and as a refuge to the pandemic. The temporality and contingent nature of this new work speaks to this profound time of flux and disruption while celebrating the resiliency of form, color, expression, and the human spirit.

Colangelo (b. Toronto, Canada) lives and works in St. Louis, MO. He is the Ralph J. Nagel dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts, Washington University in St. Louis. In this role, he oversees the College of Art, College of Architecture— as well as the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. Colangelo’s work has been featured in 44 solo shows and more than 100 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. His work has been collected by many of the nation’s leading museums, including the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.