David Kim Whittaker

Opera Gallery Hong Kong is delighted to present David Kim Whittaker’s first exhibition in Hong Kong. The exhibition predominantly features recent paintings from “The Fear and the Stable” series shown alongside a small selection of archive works.

David Kim Whittaker is one of the most enthralling and intriguing artists of this generation, intuitively perpetuating and reshaping the tradition established by British Romantics including Francis Bacon, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland.

These complex works juggle between duel states of inner and outer calm and conflict, offering us a glimpse of strength and fragility, peace and discord, the conscious and subconscious, the masculine and the feminine through areas both delicate and intricate, alongside the more physical and often brutal gestural passages of paint. These ubiquitous states of conflict are arguably reinforced by Whittaker’s gender dysphoria and the personal struggle with a condition that Whittaker has learned to live with through his endeavour of expressing something bigger than oneself through painting. The result is a universal human portrait of the 21st century, one which emphasises the split of the utopian and the dystopian nature of the times that we live in.