'In my work, the starting point is the world: my relationship with a person, something I saw, or an experience I had. Then it goes deeper and deeper into a painting world, which translates our phenomenological experiences into something that can only happen in painting language.' —Doron LangbergRepresenting an urgent and important emerging voice in contemporary figurative painting, Israeli-born Doron Langberg’s chromatically vibrant, and often large-scale works are grounded in a careful study of vulnerability, queer intimacy, and community. Frequently eliciting close comparison to the compositions of French Intimistes Pierre Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, Langberg’s paintings also belong to an emotionally charged revival of figurative painting unfolding in New York and headed by the likes of Jennifer Packer and Salman Toor. This auction debut comes shortly after Langberg’s first solo exhibition with Victoria Miro in London and marks an exciting moment in the deepening critical appreciation that surrounds this emerging artist.

Departing from the more overtly erotic depictions of men in sexually explicit compositions that Langberg has become well-known for, Amy in Her Studio belongs to a body of work that shifted focus away from the vulnerability, tenderness, and awkwardness bound up with the sexual encounter into a deeper and more nuanced examination of the complexities embedded in our intimate relationships. As the artist explains, while ‘using a sexual image can be a powerful vehicle’ for exploring emotional depth, an expansion of these terms has allowed him to develop ‘a fuller understanding of what intimacy is, and […] how more complex emotions can find homes in different imagery.’ⁱ

 

Doron Langberg discussing his inspiration and practice for Art Drunk’s ‘Why I paint’ series 

 

Intimacy and ‘Queer Intimism’

 

In what some have dubbed the ‘New Queer Intimism’, Langberg presents his circle of friends and lovers, often arranging them in domestic interiors executed in dissolving washes of colour that blur the boundaries between material reality and memory.  Subject and environment flow into one another in Langberg’s paintings, reconfiguring the shallow picture plane as a space of great emotional and psychological depth.

A recurring character in Langberg’s painting, Amy - a fellow artist and friend - is shown here alone, sitting cross-legged on the floor of her studio, her shoulders rolled slightly forward as she leans her weight onto her elbows. Surrounded by canvas, scissors, and other studio ephemera, she seems elusive and absorbed in thought. Executed in the same washes of rich, golden yellow and inky black as the space she occupies, Langberg collapses distinctions between the interiority and environment of his sitter here as Amy’s studio and a study of Amy herself become remarkably interwoven. As Langberg has described, his interiors are highly charged and emotional spaces, at once real and ‘something that’s more of a continuation of the figure’s interior life.’  As a working space where the artist explores ideas and turns them into material realities of their own, the studio perhaps most vividly captures this porous exchange between interiority and environment that preoccupies Langberg’s painting.

'In my early twenties, my work was much more explicit. There was a conflation of intimacy and sex. As I grew as a person […] I found that my language could also describe friendship and familial closeness. It doesn’t have to be tied to sex or sexuality to be about queerness.'
—Doron Langberg 

Bonnard and the Intimistes 

 

Langberg makes frequent and lyrical reference to his art-historical mentors, as the recent presentation of his strikingly sensual Lover alongside Hans Holbein’s iconic Portrait of Sir Thomas More as part of the ongoing Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters aptly demonstrates. Citing Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Édouard Manet, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler as reference points which ground his own approach to the tradition of figurative painting, Langberg’s particular blend of psychological directness and domestic quietude most vividly recalls Pierre Bonnard’s scintillating canvases. Drawing on the same intense luminosity and vibrancy and shallow pictorial space employed by the French master, the titular Amy here appears to emerge from the dreamy washes of yellow ground, as undisturbed by our presence as Bonnard’s many depictions of his model and muse Marthe floating in the bathtub or moving about their home. 
 

As in Bonnard’s painting too, it is the objects of everyday life that anchor the shallow composition here, the shocking blue of the role of tape cropped just out of frame in the upper right-hand side of the canvas possessing a sudden and unexpected material weight that counterbalances the lighter, more ephemeral aspects of the composition. These are friends, artists, sharing their domestic and working spaces in the 21st century, woven into the fabric of each other’s lives just as the tender portraits of Vuillard and Bonnard from a century before capture.

 

Unlike Bonnard though, who rarely painted from life, Langberg’s painterly process involves close and careful observation of his subjects, working initially on smaller-scale portraits in direct contact with his subjects. Demanding and deepening the sense of mutual trust, comfort, and intimacy that is developed in the relationship between model and painter, his paintings posses a psychological intensity and emotional charge that is impossible to ignore.

 

Collector’s Digest

 

•    Currently based in New York, in 2011 Langberg was awarded the Schoelkopf Travel Prize at Yale University, where he graduated with an MFA in 2012.

 

•    Since his graduation, he has exhibited at a range of galleries in New York and beyond, opening his first solo exhibition in London, Give Me Love with Victoria Miro in 2021.

 

•    Most recently, his work was included as part of Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Masters, the Frick Collection’s temporary residence at Frick Madison which placed four contemporary artists in direct dialogue with Old Master paintings with a particular focus on gender and queer identity normally overlooked in European histories of art.

 

Living Histories: In conversation with Doron Langberg 

 

ⁱ Doron Langberg, ‘What’s Love Got to Do With It: Gaby Collins-Fernandez & Doron Langberg with Jarrett Earnest’, Brooklyn Rail, Nov 2015, online. 
ⁱⁱ Tyler Malone, ‘Doron Langberg and the New Queer Intimism’, Jewish Currents, Falll 2019, online. 
ⁱⁱⁱ Doron Langberg, quoted in Tyler Malone, ‘Doron Langberg and the New Queer Intimism, Jewish Currents, Falll 2019, online.