David Diao (Chengdu, Sichuan, China 1943) began making paintings in 1964, nine years after moving to New York from Hong Kong. His work is devoted to the lineage of abstraction and is grounded in his personal history as an immigrant of Chinese heritage. His works riff on famous Modernist paintings and borrow images and motifs from works by artists such as Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollock, Kasimir Malevich, and Barnett Newman. He uses catalogues, archival photographs, and ephemera as points of reference. The works are both tributes to, and interrogations of, the subject-artists' careers.
Among Diao’s awards and honors are a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in painting (1973), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1990), and an Adolph and Esther Gottleib Foundation Grant (1993). Diao received his B.A. from Kenyon College and was on faculty at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program from 1970 to 2000. The artist lives and works in New York.
