Nov 7, 2008 -- Yeshiva University Museum is pleased to announce a panel discussion "Figuration, Abstraction and the Spiritual" featuring the exhibition "David Stern: The American Years 1995-2008" on November 13, 2008 at 6:30 pm. The curator of the traveling exhibition, Karen Wilkin, will introduce and moderate a panel including the artist, David Stern, and the art critic Lance Esplund, as well as noted New York artists Archie Rand and Jill Nathanson. The panel will discuss the visual languages inventive present day artists employ to embody spiritual content in wholly contemporary terms. "David Stern: The American Years 1995-2008," co-curated by Karen Wilkin and Reba Wulkan is on view through February 8, 2009 at Yeshiva University Museum. The fifty-seven paintings and drawings on view demonstrate shifts in form and content in Stern’s work since the artist moved to New York from Germany in 1995. His forceful and energetic canvases, covered in inches-thick layers of paint, convey the dizzying, exciting, and sometimes sinister experience of the modern metropolis. Stern has referred to himself as an “action painter,” echoing the artistic legacies of New York School painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline. Yet his captivating human forms—by turns tragic, grotesque, and vulnerable—reach further back to histories of portraiture. Concurrent with its showing at Yeshiva University Museum, "David Stern: The American Years 1995-2008" will be on view at the Alexandre Hogue Gallery of the University of Tulsa in Tulsa, Oklahoma from October 30 through November 28, 2008. The exhibition will travel to the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, South Carolina from October through December 2010; and it will continue to travel nationally until 2012. The exhibition is under the patronage of the Consul General of the Federal Republic of Germany, Horst Freitag. It is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts. The accompanying catalogue is fully illustrated and features an interview by Karen Wilkin and an essay by noted art critic Lance Esplund. David Stern was born in 1956 in Essen, Germany. He attended art school in both Dortmund (1975-79) and Dusseldorf (1980-82). He immigrated to New York in 1995, and has exhibited widely in the US and Germany since then. His work can be found in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), The U.S. Embassy in Vienna, Dresdner Bank (Cologne, Germany), and the Arkansas Art Center (Little Rock). Click to view David Stern Gallery