Dialogues: David M. Ball & Ilya Shkipin Opening Reception

Submitted by the Event Organizer

Please join us for the opening reception of an exhibition of new works from David M. Ball and Ilya Shkipin.

Painters David M. Ball and Ilya Shkipin both begin with images that have already passed through contemporary systems of seeing: photographs, digital collage, generative tools, and the inherited languages of art history. Yet neither artist treats technology as the subject of the work. For both, it is a point of departure—a way of loosening the image from certainty so that painting can begin.

Ball constructs through accumulation. He brings together figures, costumes, gestures, and visual histories that seem to belong to different times, then reorganizes them into crowded, theatrical worlds. His paintings feel ceremonial and unsettled, populated by bodies that appear assembled rather than fixed. In this act of recombination, Ball resists the safety of repetition. Surprise becomes a discipline, a way of keeping perception open and allowing the image to become unfamiliar even to its maker.

Shkipin moves in the opposite direction. Where Ball builds, Shkipin erodes. He slows the image through paint until faces, interiors, and bodies begin to waver. Forms smear, drift, and partially disappear, becoming less like representations than memories under pressure. His figures remain intimate yet unreachable, suspended between recognition and loss.

Together, these paintings occupy the fragile threshold where the familiar becomes strange. One artist multiplies the image; the other dissolves it. Both return digitally mediated source material to the physical resistance of oil paint, where touch, revision, hesitation, and the body reassert themselves. Their work asks what survives after an image has passed through technology, history, memory, and the hand.

What remains is neither certainty nor resolution. It is presence: fractured, mutable, and still capable of connection.

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