Nov 3, 2008 -- The Yeshiva University Museum is the first venue of a national traveling exhibition of paintings by David Stern, a German native who immigrated to New York City in 1995. The 57 paintings and drawings in “Abstraction, Figuration, and the Spiritual David Stern: The American Years (1995-2008)” demonstrate shifts in form and content in Stern’s work since the artist arrived in New York. Stern’s 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. The exhibition, co-curated by Karen Wilkin and Reba Wulkan is on view through February 8. Many of Stern’s New York paintings were executed in series, often simultaneously: “Skypieces” (1999-2001), “Random Cycles” (1997-2000) and “Common Ground” (1996-2000). After the attacks on September 11, 2001, Stern focused his energy on one series that he titled “The Gatherings,” which reflects on the collective mourning of the city following that tragedy; these two paintings are a promised gift to the National September 11 Museum and Memorial in New York City, which is scheduled to open in 2011. "David Stern can be described, with equal accuracy, as a figurative painter who freely reconstitutes his perceptions with emphasis on the materiality of his medium, as a genre painter who deals with contemporary experience, or as an expressionist who discovers suggestive images by exploring the physical qualities of paint," Wilkin said. A special panel discussion about the exhibit will be held on November 13 at 6:30 pm, moderated by Wilkin. Panelists include the artist himself; Lance Esplund, former chief art critic of the “New York Sun”; and artists Jill Nathanson and Archie Rand. Concurrent with its showing at the YU, “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 features an interview by Karen Wilkin and an essay by Lance Esplund. David Stern was born in 1956 in Essen, Germany. He attended art school in both Dortmund (1975-79) and Düsseldorf (1980-82). He has exhibited widely in the US and Germany. 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).