Enrico David: a rare breed of sculptor
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Based in London since the late 1980s, Italian artist Enrico David has developed a practice that moves fluently across painting, sculpture, tapestry, drawing and installation. Trained at Central Saint Martins, where he graduated in Sculpture in 1994, he has built these last decades a body of work centred on the human figure — not as a stable subject, but as a mutable structure, constantly undergoing transformation. His works examine vulnerability, instability and metamorphosis through an ever-shifting set of materials and formats. Although his work has occasionally been associated with Surrealism, David has never sought to align himself with that tradition: his formal language has instead evolved organically, driven by an ongoing inquiry into how bodies bend, fragment and hover between legibility and distortion. Whether rendered in plaster, bronze, fabric, paint or charcoal, his figures appear suspended in states of becoming — animated by psychological, physical or imaginative shifts.
Enrico David is truly one of a kind. Upon looking at the quality of his work, it is easy to assume now he was destined to make it as an artist. But things were not always so obvious, as his work stands out like a sore thumb in the contemporary sculpting scene. Profoundly nourished by a heap of visual influences across art history and beyond, David’s work cannot be narrowed down to any particular art current. If it can evoke Giotto frescoes or surrealism at first sight, its real genealogy is much more promiscuous, as art history and folk sources collide with design logic, advertising syntax, and sometimes even explicit queer imagery. Interviewed by the Financial Times in 2023, David recalled his early career: “My art practice was so irrelevant and out of sync with the current trends it allowed for total invisibility.” In 1999, however, the notorious art collector Charles Saatchi acquired one of his works during an exhibition in Glasgow, and David’s career gradually progressed from there. In 2003, he was taking part in the Venice Biennale for the first time and from the mid-2000’s onward he was represented by Michael Werner Gallery. Fast forward two decades, and White Cube recently announced in 2025 it was representing the artist alongside Michael Werner.
David was born in 1966 in Ancona, Italy, into a family of artisans—an environment in which making things by hand was part of everyday life. This early exposure to craft and material knowledge left a lasting imprint on his practice, later informing his sustained engagement with textiles, embroidery and sculptural processes. Before fully committing to art, he studied modern languages in Bologna. In 1988, drawn by London’s vibrant new wave scene, he moved to the city without a fixed artistic programme, supporting himself through various jobs — including a stint at a McDonald’s on Kensington High Street, which he chose partly to observe fashion and urban style at close range. After settling in Brixton, he began painting at home before enrolling at Central Saint Martins where he graduated in 1994 with a BA in Sculpture. It was in the following years that David first gained attention, notably for his large-scale embroidered portraits developed from drawings or collages, sometimes inspired by fashion imagery.
These early works already revealed a core concern that continues to shape his practice: translation. How does a drawing become textile? How does an image turn into an object? What happens to representation as it shifts from one medium to another? Over time, this inquiry led him to expand his vocabulary to include painting, plaster and bronze sculpture, installations, tapestries and works on paper.
Despite this material diversity, drawing remains central to David’s process. It often serves as the starting point from which his sculptures and paintings emerge. In a recent studio interview for White Cube, the artist explained that the difficulty of translating two-dimensional images into three-dimensional objects continues to generate much of the tension present in his sculptural work. This friction between flatness and volume, image and object, remains a driving force in his practice. David’s incredibly plural sculptural output embodies these contradictions in brilliant fashion, in particular by teetering voluntarily between uselessness and function. he creates a wide array of objects that oscillate between the appearance of furniture design and outright sculpture, using a vast number of materials (wood, metal, plaster etc.). David himself does not consider his works of that sort as anything else than sculpture. But he loves the idea of embedding them in a pre-existing reality such as a chair, a table or a lamp, which implies a potential function for the object whilst departing from it at the same time.
As of late, he uses a lot of wax in his sculptural work. After having worked with plaster for years, the artist also started to naturally go more and more towards wax and polymer plaster, drawn to the latter for its resemblance to ivory and its organic, bodily quality.
According to Enrico David, human nature through all its external aspects — facial expressions, bodily postures, etc. — has long been what drives his creative process. The sculptor sees himself as both a vehicle to express human emotions and a provider of a new form of reality that exceeds any form of determinism. As he puts it: “I really do think of artists as databases and accumulators of experiences and information that we end up finding a way to use rather than just be passive recipients of them. There is almost like a utopian form of activism inherent to the creative process, which is about changing the reality that you’re in, not only by trying to express your response to it, but to actually say: if it was down to me, I would just do it like that. So, it’s almost like a symbolic form of protest.” And, for a long time, David’s vision of art placed him slightly out of step with prevailing expectations. His refusal to settle into a given sculptural language, his insistence on hybrid forms, and his use of materials associated as much with domestic space as with fine art made his work difficult to categorise. But this resistance to clarity — formal, functional, or stylistic — has gradually come to be recognised as one of the strengths of his practice, as testified by his increasing recognition on the institutional forefront.
Indeed, since the early 2000s, Enrico David has been the subject of important solo and group exhibitions across Europe and the United States. These include Tate Britain (2005), three participations in the Venice Biennale (2003, 2013 and 2019), and a major retrospective, Gradations of Slow Release, presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 2018–2019, which mapped twenty years of his production. On top of that, his works are now held in major institutional collections, including those of MCA Chicago, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Hammer Museum and Tate Britain. Last but not least, he is now jointly represented by Michael Werner Gallery and White Cube, which just presented its first solo exhibition of David’s work in Paris through December 2025. In short, Enrico David has a bright future ahead of him. We cannot wait to see more of his work in the coming years.