Since the mid-2000s, Swiss artist David Hominal has been one of the most original and vigorous voices of the contemporary art scene. Working primarily with painting–principally in series–he also explores sculpture, drawing, film, printmaking, performance and installation. His multifaceted work is the offspring of an exceptionally intense relationship with the world. It is a place where images drawn from both personal and everyday sources interact; where disciplines such as dance, music and the visual arts converge. This first monograph on his oeuvre offers an overview of his practice, underlining his engagement in representation, expression of the self and the traditions of art and art history. As French art critic and curator Stephanie Moisdon states in her commissioned essay: Hominal’s oeuvre stands firm in the middle of the contemporary tumult, neither reveals nor conceals any hidden part. It stands there, in the entire coarseness of its appearance. No tongue-in-cheek humor, no false flooring, illusion or trickery. His painting expresses only what it shows, diverting the endeavors, as tiring as they are many, to clarify and reveal. In his work there is a constant oscillation between homage and dismantling, between too much and too little, between the elimination (of sources, of contexts) and the appropriation (of sensations, of intensities), from which bare forms arise. A second essay by Laurence Schmidlin, Musee Jenisch Deputy Director and Head of the Cabinet cantonal des estampes, analyzes Hominal’s practice and relationship to printmaking in the global context of his work.
David Hominal was born in 1976 in Evian, France. He graduated from ECAL (Lausanne) and is now based in Berlin. He exhibited recently at Helmhaus, Zurich; Centre d'art contemporain, Geneva; Kunsthalle Bern, Bern; and the Swiss Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include a solo show at Le Consortium, Dijon, and at Musee Jenisch Vevey (on the occasion of which this volume is published).
