David Onri Anderson
Biography
David Onri Anderson (b.1993, Nashville, TN) is a French-Algerian-American artist born in Tennessee. He is inspired by good storytelling and world building processes. He believes in angels and will sometimes communicate with them in order to make paintings.
Anderson graduated from Watkins College of Art in Nashville with the Anny Gowa Purchase Award in 2016. He has had solo exhibitions at Patrick Painter Gallery in Los Angeles, CA, Blaa Galleri in Copenhagen, DK, Harpy Gallery in Rutherford, NJ, Sheet Cake Gallery in Memphis, TN, Atlanta Contemporary Arts Center, Institute 193 in Lexington, KY amongst others. His work has been reviewed, exhibited and collected internationally with works in permanent collections including the Soho House in Los Angeles, CA and Nashville, TN, The Joseph Hotel, and the Metro Arts Library in Nashville, TN, amongst others. His work has been reviewed in Art in America, Artnet, BURNAWAY, DailyLazy, Art & Antiques and more. In 2021 Anderson was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Anderson is founder and curator of an artist-run space called Electric Shed Gallery in Nashville, TN (2018-present).
Haystack Perspective
David Onri Anderson’s paintings are impressions of sensory and spiritual experiences with images. Anderson employs experimental, non-objective and intuitive approaches to process and materials, with influences from Jewish mysticism and tantric art to cosmic philosophy. Tantra is beyond the ‘moral’. Not ‘what should be’, the primary concert of Tantra is ‘what is’, a sincere and honest acceptance of oneself and the world around. Tantra is a spiritual science that examines experiences of ‘self’ with the material world and explores man’s inherent energies, spiritual and physical, methods to expand them, and his place and relevance in the cosmos.
Anderson elevates quotidian objects (bananas, candles, mushrooms) and raises them to a spiritual realm where we can appreciate them in their abstracted bliss. In this way, a banana becomes something much more than a healthy snack. It is a source of energy for the painter to create transcendent images.
From the Artist
“I love the opportunity to paint emotion into things and give them a new magical presence from my life experience.”