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David Haxton (b. 1943, USA) is a filmmaker and photographer. Active in the New York City experimental scene in the 1970s and 80s, he exhibited in all of the major spaces : The Anthology Film Archives (1976), the Museum of Modern Art’s renowned Cineprobe series (1978), the Whitney (1975, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983, 2015).
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The gallery is pleased to reveal a series of never exhibited, unique vintage diptychs from 1976.
Each work was made with 8 x 10 in negatives, and has a startling depth, and precision.
While the works are enriched by their context - they were made on the film sets of the artist's canonical experimental films - as individual works they are striking, potent, and intriguing. -
In the 1970's Haxton's photography and films were exhibited in New York and Paris with Sonnabend gallery, the gallery renowned for bringing American conceptual and minimal art to Europe and European conceptual art and Arte Povera to New York.
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“I became interested in making photographs because of my interest in the medium of film. The first photographs were made from leftover set materials from the films. Those materials happen to be the essence of the photograph, backdrop paper and light. The subject of the photographs is paper, light and space. The diptychs remain tied to the films in that they are like two frame films. I later abandoned the diptych format for the traditional concept of the photograph as a record of a single moment in time. In general, the photographic work owes more to Man Ray than to Cartier Bresson.”
- D.H.
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Haxton’s work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Albright Knox Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, MoMA, New York, Kadist Foundation, Polaroid Collection, and the Chicago Art Institute.
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Select recent group exhibitions include at Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2022), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018), Pirelli Hangarbicocca, Milan, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015).
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FILMS
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Haxton's most canonical films were a series of 16 16mm films shot in the negative on a Bolex camera. In each film, the artist or a performer carried out a series of simple actions in the studio that engage with the 2-dimensionality of the film frame. The films explore flatness, dimensionality, and optical illusion.
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"I became interested in examining the nature of the medium including light, movement, and the formation of a three- dimensional illusion on a flat surface."
- David Haxton, MoMA Cineprobe presentation, 1978
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Jonas Mekas, the influential filmmaker and theorist, described Haxton’s works in the Village Voice in 1975 as “The most inventive exploration of negative-positive possibilities and illusions that I’ve seen in film.”
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Each film is shot from a static camera angle, and lasts as long as it takes for the performer to complete the prescribed task. Action takes place as movement back and forth across the picture plane. Because black and white are reversed in the negative, light appears as black spots, and the usual spatial references are rendered oblique.
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Bringing Lights Forward
1970, 4 min. b&w, 16mm, silent -
Vertical and Receding Lines
1974, 5 min. 30 sec. 16mm silent -
Cutting Light and Dark Holes
1974-5, 8 min. b&w, 16mm, silent -
Pyramid Drawings
1976-77, 12 min. b&w, 16mm, silent -
Painting Lights
1976, 7 min. 14 sec. b&w, 16mm, silent -
The full set of films is available on request.
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OFFSCREEN Paris 2025
At OFFSCREEN Paris, at La Chapelle Saint-Louis de la Salpetriere October 21-26, 2025, La Patinoire Royale Bach presented Moving Picture Screens (1974) a never exhibited film installation, Bringing Lights Forward (1970), the first of the artist's canonical 16mm experimental films, and a series of never exhibited vintage diptych photographs by David Haxton. -
DAVID HAXTON
Current viewing_room
