Postmasters

DAVID DIAO has been showing with Postmasters since its founding in 1985.  He will have the gallery's final show before the move from Chelsea to new quarters. This will be his eleventh solo with the gallery. 

For over 40 years Diao has nurtured a practice which looks critically at painting and its history. He questions how value is assigned to art and artists, and often implicates himself in the contradictions of this process
The show will have selections from 1991 to the present. Double Rejection, 2012, documents a moment when his painting hung in the board room at MoMA. The newest work Spine 1, 2013, is based on the abraded spine of the catalog of Barnett Newman's Stations of the Cross which has been in Diao's possession since its publication in 1966. He will also present some very small copies of several of his favorite geometric paintings from the 70s in the manner of Duchamp's Boite-en-valise.
In the fall of 2012 Diao showed works from his Melnikov series in a 2 person show with Walid Raad at Paula Cooper Gallery.  Holland Cotter writing in the NYT about this show reached back to praise Diao's 2009 show at Postmasters as one of the most moving of that year.
Last month he was invited to speak on Barnett Newman for DIA Art Foundation in their Artists on Artists Lecture series.