DAVID KIM WHITTAKER

David Kim Whittaker artworks consist of mixed media paintings on canvas or panel, painted studies incorporating collage and occasional assemblage ‘still life / portrait’ sculptures and more recently written verse and sound installation. His artworks are a harmonised conflict of delicate figurative and expressive abstract elements. Most of Whittaker’s paintings are based upon a metaphysical interpretation of the human head. The portraits are ambiguous, with the ambitious aim of representing the totality of the human condition, both the universal alongside the personal. The works often juggle dual states of inner and outer calm and conflict, offering a glimpse of strength and fragility, the conscious and the subconscious, the masculine and the feminine. These universal states of conflict clearly identifiable in Whittaker's works are arguably reinforced by Whittaker’s ‘gender dysphoria’ and the personal struggle with a condition that he/she has learned to live with through painting and the endeavour of expressing something bigger than oneself...

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David Kim Whittaker is a British contemporary artist born in Cornwall in 1964 where he still resides. Exhibitions have been held internationally, notably including a solo exhibition at the prestigious Fondazione Mudima in Milan in 2017 curated by Joseph Clarke. Works are in numerous museum collections, art foundations and international private collections. Whittaker was further acknowledged in 2011 as the recipient of the Towry Award (First Prize) at the National Open Art Competition in the UK.