David Spriggs
June 20 - August 22, 2026
Opening June 20th at 6 p.m.
David Spriggs curated by Marc Mayer
Arsenal Contemporary New York is pleased to present a selection of works by David Spriggs, coinciding with his inclusion in the current Iris van Herpen exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. Bringing together works that move between atmosphere, space, and immaterial form, the exhibition foregrounds Spriggs’s long-standing investigation into how images become spatial events.
Spriggs's procedure stays constant across a range of subjects, from figurative compositions with political implications to the blurred boundaries between meteorological phenomena and abstraction. He paints on layered transparent panels, two-dimensional marks accumulating through space until they accrue into an illusion of depth and mass. The same method that renders the unbounded violence of a cyclone or the swelling of a wave also reconstructs the tropes of high modernism—the saturated hush of a 1950s Rothko colour field, or the gestural/hard edge fusion of a 1960s Hurtubise. He treats these not as styles to quote but as phenomena to rearticulate. And whether the subject is a wave or fields of colour, the deeper subject is the same: how a mark, multiplied through space, can hold an image that has no edges. This is also where the work declares its lineage. Like Katarzyna Kobro, Spriggs wants to define space without filling it—to border volume by colour and plane rather than by mass. Constructivism's dream of structure without solidity survives here, dispersed into transparency: not so much Kobro's method as her refusal, the insistence that space can have a body without the anchor of a solid core.
That refusal exposes an irony at the center of the work. The immateriality is staged through matter—the mark seems to float free of any substrate, while so many physical layers conspire to suspend it. This is a post-material formalism produced by wholly material means: the object disavows its own substance while depending on it. There is a deeper rhyme here. Physics does not picture matter as solid but as a suspension of discrete, largely autonomous particles—structure without a continuous core—and Spriggs's stacked transparencies stage the same paradox, a volume that, examined closely, dissolves into separate marks held apart in space. The illusion of substance and the fact of its absence form a coherent image. Whether he renders a cyclone, a field of colour, or the suspended particles of matter itself, the procedure holds: two-dimensional marks, multiplied through space, conjuring a body that isn't there.
David Spriggs is a British-Canadian artist known for large-scale installations that operate between painting, sculpture, and optics. Born in Manchester, England, in 1978, he immigrated to Canada in 1992. He received a BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver and an MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, with additional student residencies at Central Saint Martins in London and Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Since 1999, Spriggs has developed a distinctive method of layering painted or printed transparent images in space to produce ethereal three-dimensional forms. His work explores perception, movement, colour, space-time, surveillance, and the visual languages of power and control. Hovering between material object and immaterial phenomenon, his installations ask viewers to experience images as spatial events rather than fixed surfaces.
Spriggs has exhibited internationally, with projects and exhibitions in Canada, the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. He is currently based in Vancouver Island, British Columbia.
In 2024, David Spriggs was awarded the Prix artistique de l’espace of the Académie des beaux-arts and the Fondation Jacques Rougerie.