CARMON COLANGELO

20-YEAR SURVEY

April 24 - June 27, 2026  | Artist Talk: Saturday, May 2 | 4 PM

Bruno David Gallery is pleased to present Carmon Colangelo: 20-Year Survey, bringing together paintings and print-based works by the St. Louis–based artist. The exhibition traces the evolution of Carmon Colangelo's distinctive visual language from 2005 to the present—one grounded in layering, experimentation, and sustained inquiry into the systems that shape perception and contemporary life

Over two decades, Colangelo has moved fluidly between printmaking and painting, analog process and conceptual investigation. Drawing and watercolor books remain integral to his studio practice, reinforcing a commitment to the intimacy of the hand. His works draw on cartography, environmental imagery, anatomical diagrams, and abstraction, creating dynamic surfaces where structure and improvisation coexist. Through overprinting, erasure, and recombination, he constructs visual fields that feel at once expansive and unsettled—echoing earlier explorations of planetary change, perception, and unstable terrain.

For Colangelo, printmaking is not simply a medium but a methodology: an opportunity to revisit, rework, and recontextualize images over time. Painting intervenes with immediacy and gesture, complicating mechanical reproduction with the perceptible presence of the artist's hand. The resulting works resist singular readings; instead, they unfold gradually, revealing layered networks of reference and meaning.

Across this two-decade arc, recurring themes emerge: environmental fragility, the permeability of borders, the collapse and reconstruction of meaning, and the human impulse to map the unknown. Landscapes merge with data. Atmospheric fields intersect with diagrammatic marks. What initially appears chaotic resolves into carefully calibrated compositions that balance chance and control.

More recent works extend this inquiry into technological change. While some pieces engage language-based AI models as conceptual prompts, the newest paintings return decisively to analog processes—drawing, watercolor, and layered surface work that reaffirm Colangelo's enduring commitment to the handmade. Together, these works explore the interplay between human and machine intelligence, between fascination and unease, at a moment of rapid transformation.

Carmon Colangelo (b. Toronto, Canada) lives and works in St. Louis, Missouri. He is the Ralph J. Nagel Dean of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. Colangelo's work has been featured in 30 solo exhibitions and more than 100 group exhibitions nationally and internationally. His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University; and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others. He earned a B.F.A. in printmaking and painting from the University of Windsor (1981) and an M.F.A. in printmaking from Louisiana State University (1983).