Archived Exhibition

David Buckingham: AS SEEN ON TV
Metal Wall sculpture
22 October - 14 November, 2009

Buckingham paints nothing (although he is a fine colorist, judging by his juxtapositions), yet he exposes a great deal, unceremoniously and unsanctimoniously, about the dark side of what the president once called “our sacred way of life.”

De Witt Cheng, in Artwork June 2008

CAIN SCHULTE GALLERY BERLIN is proud to announce the inaugural exhibition on October 22, 2009. The Berlin gallery is located in Schöneberg near Winterfeldtplatz in a spacious ‘Berliner Altbau’ apartment. Director Kit Schulte will feature the first of a series of introductory solo shows with works by our American artists. Both the San Francisco and the Berlin gallery are now poised to represent their selected group of American and European artists in a cross-cultural setting. Several exhibitions will be traveling between the two locations. “As Seen on TV”, an exhibition with new wall sculptures by Los Angeles artist David Buckingham, shown this summer in San Francisco, will make its’ Berlin debut.

In his work, Buckingham re-creates famous lines and popular images from the movies, cartoons, and TV, in discarded metal—never painted, just assembled and welded together—that he harvests from junkyards and abandoned machinery he finds in the Southern California desert.

The pieces included in the show feature images and symbols extrapolated from the media, in particular from TV shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and movie lines from films related the era (Platoon, Taxi Driver). The artist re-contextualizes them as iconic images of the American culture with a wry sense of humor.

While similar pop imagery usually tends to promote a romanticization of the era and seem to rely on the feel-good effect of memorabilia, Buckingham’s work takes a more critical approach. Eschewing a direct endeavor at sentimentalism, his work aims at investigating the dichotomy between what was happening at home and in the world, and how it was dealt with by the media and in the private realm. So, while the country was ravaged by the Vietnam War, the Civil Riots, and shaken by the sexual revolution, the TV was showing Barney Fife, Will Rogers, and Batman, as a way to divert the public’s attention, at the same time providing an instance of escapism from the unsettling reality.

The references in Buckingham’s work are easily accessible and engage the observer in an active participation at the exact moment of recognition, lending an added level of significance, and amusement, to the points in which factual reality becomes altered by the act of memory.

David Buckingham’s work has been displayed in several solo and group shows in galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, and his works are in many private collections In the Us and in Europe.

Opening: Thursday, October 22nd, 2009, 7pm
Cain Schulte Gallery Berlin, Winterfeldtstr. 35, 10781 Berlin, (Ubahn: Nollendorfplatz, U1, U2, U3, U4)
Gallery Hours (starting November 4th): Wednesday – Friday: 12:00 – 6:00 pm and always by appointment.