David Barthold at Spoke the Hub
Barthold presents new works in Park Slope
Don’t miss Brooklyn-based artist David Barthold’s excellent exhibit at Spoke the Hub!
The multi-media artist’s bold and exuberant work is inspired by vintage advertising and typography, as well as the architecture, signage, and grittiness of the city. “I’m very preoccupied with line work, typography, and 19th century advertising, the tricks and the lures that advertisers used to bring the public in,” Barthold said Wednesday evening at Spoke the Hub. “Sign painting, the use of sign painter brushes and paints, some of the convex shapes, the lozenge shape and the column shape – the fact that people use light poles for advertising…I’m very intrigued by the devices that people used to attract the attention of others and to make meaning very clear in a public setting.”
A New York City native, Barthold began printmaking at age 13 with Ruth Leaf at her studio in Queens. He studied printmaking at Oberlin College and engraving at Atelier 17 in Paris with Stanley William Hayter. After a nearly 30-year hiatus – working in various trades including construction, cabinet making, and ceramics manufacturing – Barthold returned to printmaking in 2011. “I was brought back because a friend of mine was making etchings and I thought, ‘I can do that,’” Barthold recalls. “I’d spent most of my youth doing that, so I was kind of goaded by envy or jealousy into the studio again because…my friend was doing it, and I wasn’t.” The decades-long break did not diminish his skills. “My ability to engrave is sort of like riding a bicycle,” Barthold says. “It was something I learned at a very early age, and it came right back to me…. I still had this capacity for this intricate line work.”
He returned to the medium producing a series of engravings of animals, including a black rhinoceros, a Sumatran tiger, and a gorilla, based on photos he’d taken at zoos during family trips over the years. “I sort of fell in step again with the whole scene, and I’ve been in step with it since then,” he says, noting that his practice has evolved. “I expanded into other media, so a lot of what I do on panel, or the masks, or on the constructed pieces, is print based. I’m a painter too, so I’ll start applying paint to panel with sign painter’s brushes and paints. That sort of whiplash, fluid line that you see in the engravings has kind of migrated to other media in painted forms.”
Barthold’s works at Spoke the Hub include sculptures and masks emblazoned with painted etching marks, typography, and collage. “Those two columns are actually a half dimensional light pole,” he explains of Post No Bills Columns 1 and 2. “If they were put together, they would form a section of a light pole.” Two pieces that resemble shields, Armoriala and Ameburina, are “actually inspired by the shape of a capsule,” Barthold continues. “The cartouche shape is universal, you see it a lot in architecture,” Names, insignia, or “heraldic figurations” are often inscribed on this shape, so Barthold “thought it was a pretty classic 3-D canvas” for his collage work. “I was tired of the ‘tyranny of the rectangle and the plane,’ as I call it. I wanted to get my work into forms that came out at you…that weren’t introspective.”
His works feature abstracted lettering of the phrase “Post No Bills.” “I wanted to take the language of prohibition and use it as an element of an art form,” he explains. The works also display a decorative feature culled from a photo Barthold took of a firehouse’s limestone façade. “These floral, vegetable forms derive from that carving, but they took on a life of their own. They’re the touchstone for all this voluptuous linear work,” he notes.
Barthold hopes visitors to his show will be encouraged to take a closer look at their surroundings. “A lot of this relates to what we can see on the street in New York – colors, textures, patterns,” he says. “I want people to see what I see. I pass a rusty dumpster and I’ll take a picture of it because the erosion of the color on the dumpster is just intriguing to me. I’m constantly taking snapshots of architectural elements: finials, capitals, little bits of cast iron work on fence posts, limestone carvings on lintels. I want people to see the richness of the city around them – or what survives of it – rather than the kind of slab city that’s going up to replace it, look for and recognize beauty and understand that it’s meant for them. It’s a gift that creative people give to them, even in the structure of the city itself.”
While seeking beauty in the city, art lovers should also look out for Barthold’s street art. Some of his murals can be found around Gowanus, Brooklyn, not far from his studio. A vinyl mural can be found on a construction wall at 3rd Avenue between Sackett & Union. One of his Wildpost Murals lives on the corner of 7th Street and 3rd Avenue. In a collaboration with Katie Merz in July 2023, Barthold posted wheat paste graphics on the bulkheads along the Gowanus Canal, just past the 9th Street Bridge. Over the years he's posted commemorative wheat paste portraits of George Floyd, John Lewis, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as satirical depictions of Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump, on light posts and construction fences across Brooklyn.
“When I went out street posting, I noticed that my prints, when they were on light poles or mailboxes, had a different life,” he says. “When you moved past them they seemed to move themselves, so the fact that they weren’t simply flat images, flat rectangular images – or they might be torn, scarred, mended over – gave them a different kind of life, a different kind of vitality on the street.”
Barthold will post a “fresh print” on the streets of Gowanus this week. He invites the public to search for his new work somewhere along 3rd or 4th Avenues between Carroll and 13th Streets.
Barthold describes his art practice as piecemeal. “It starts with parts,” he says. “I will harum scarum make little things and they’ll kind of lie around in my studio – which is famously chaotic – but the fact that they lie in juxtaposition to each other often suggests new forms to me,” he says. “It’s like the parts start to talk to each other, relate to each other, and that’s the kind of serendipitous surrender of control that I like to have. I don’t want to have a work that has a predictable result. I want it to be a surprise when it finally arrives.”
Barthold teaches adult classes at the Manhattan Graphic Center, located at Powerhouse Arts. Visit www.davidbarthold.net to see more of his artwork.
On view through October 11, 2024
Spoke the Hub
748 Union Street, Park Slope
Spoke the Hub is a not-for-profit dance and community arts organization founded in 1979.
Thank you, Pam! I really appreciate your attention and this thoughtful review.
terrific stuff!