Defiance Gallery - Horton, Dave

Turn on the radio to hear new music and you will find young bands remaking the styles of the seventies, eighties and already the nineties, and an audience enjoying it. The musicians are doing what feels good, and some of them will make original contributions to their form, but isn’t it enough, right now, that they are engaged in acts of creation? In the novelty-obsessed visual arts, the culture-bosses would require that such an embrace of tradition be packaged as a new phenomenon before it could be celebrated: post-appropriation homage perhaps. In fact, the big arts institutions ignore the many young artists who are finding their voices by revisiting the modernist traditions of the twentieth century, maybe because these artists honestly reflect a prevailing cultural inertia, and refuse the illusion of progress. David Horton works with a vocabulary of sculptural forms that is thoroughly traditional. Simple steel arcs, straights and blocks welded into considered arrangements. His sculptures embody a strong personality. They are warm-toned like a jazz saxophone and open generously onto the void. They may unfold slowly as a grand sequence of rhyming shapes, or as a quick rhythm with many parts. Some of them look strange, like new forms that resemble no other thing, but more often there is a sense of human intelligence to the forms that invites us to relate to them almost as friends. Joe Frost

Short artist bio;

BFA NAS,

Exhibiting sculpture since 1998Waverley Council Sculpture Prize, 1999,Transfield Sculpture Award,Sydney Airport Sculpture Prize 2000NAB Sculpture Prize, SxS Bondi 2007Lecturer in the Sculpture and drawing, NAS.

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Dave Horton