David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to present the first Los Angeles solo exhibition by the London based, Australian born artist David Noonan. Historical imaginations, invented memories, bohemianism and late 20th century British theatre inspire David Noonan's installation of large-scale screen prints, collages and bronze sculptures.David Noonan brings together an eclectic array of found imagery - sourced from film stills, books, magazines, and archive photos - to create dramatic scenes that suggest surreal narratives. These collages are then photographed and turned into large-scale screen prints, a technique remarkable for its sumptuous finish that relates to both artistic authenticity and mass media. Printed in harsh contrast black and white, Noonan's images encapsulate the romanticism of golden age cinema, and its associations to memory, fiction, and modern mythology.

Noonan presents a fabricated vision that is awesome in its complexity. Using the liturgy of art itself as a departure point for invention, Noonan conceives his work as 'documentation' of plausible performances: his cast of characters are positioned as participators in highly elaborate artworks, invoking covert and futuristic ritual. Stylistically referencing Surrealism and experimental film, Noonan's work poses as the aesthetic remnants of 'lost masterpieces', weaving his own extravagant fantasies into fabric of collective consciousness.These participants are presented in a cosmological and psychological realm. Noonan hints at a mythology without provenance and suggests an inexplicable scene beyond the material world. The work's layered, cinematic imagery becomes like a physical interpretation of filmic space and at times alludes to the surrealist and complex constructions of Latin American filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky in films such as Holy Mountain and Fando y Lis.

Noonan intensifies ambiguous black and white imagery collected from disparate sources, mainly books and magazines, by reassembling them according to a personal logic. Johanna Fahey describes one of Noonan's previous installations as a "custom-made flashback, tailored with an appreciation for aesthetics [used] to create a historical flavor."* In Noonan's new series, visions of a quasi - spiritual, separatist community, a pagan cult of sorts, are prompted by photographs of children and adults dancing, hugging, and practicing abstract artwork.

About the Author

Find more about David Noonan paintings, biography, solo exhibitions, group exhibitions and resource of David Noonan artist. View David Noonan artwork online at The Saatchi Gallery - London contemporary art gallery.David Noonan