GOLESTANI warmly invites you to »Travelling Light«, an exhibition of paintings by David Matthew King, on view at FIERMAN New York on the Lower East Side from May 30 through June 28. Opening reception Saturday, May 30, 2026 6—8 p.m.
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies, 1923
“You rise from the fresco bed like a god, tender cheeks still blushing” — David Matthew King
In David Matthew King’s paintings, the dead are not gone, they are watching and wandering alongside the living. The Baltimore-based artist fills his canvases with skeletons and ghosts set against luminous, layered landscapes of blue and green, building worlds that feel at once haunted and tender and, at times, genuinely funny. These are not works about death so much as works about the strange persistence of feeling after loss —the longing, the love, the absurdity, and the unanswerable questions that outlast us all. King’s figures carry a particular kind of expressiveness. The hollow eyes of child and adult skeletons turn toward the viewer with startling directness, and a certain deadpan wit. At times they seem to beckon us in; at others, they reflect our own uncertainties back at us. Some of his ghosts stand frightened before the beauty of the living world, overwhelmed by what they can no longer touch. Others linger quietly as hidden guardians—presences of protection and guidance folded into the corners of the canvas. The paintings are built slowly and deliberately: King begins with pure abstraction, gestural marks, layered form, and allows the image to surface gradually through dozens of translucent layers of paint. Color accumulates like sediment, and from that depth, figures emerge as if remembered rather than invented. This is, in fact, central to his process: works based on sketches are painted entirely from memory, never from the original drawing. The distortions that memory introduces, the softening of edges, the drift of detail, are not corrected but embraced. They are the work. What King offers, ultimately, is a meditation on time: on what we carry through it, what we lose to it, and what, perhaps, carries us. His paintings ask us to sit with mystery rather than resolve it—to stand before the unknown with open eyes, as his figures do, and simply remain.
DAVID MATTHEW KING (b. 1981, San Pedro, California) studied English Literature at the City University of New York, receiving his BA in 2008 and MA in 2011. He currently lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. King has exhibited widely across the United States and Europe, with solo and two-person exhibitions at The Dot Project, London; Shit Art Club, Los Angeles; Valerius Gallery, Luxembourg; Prisme Galleries, Paris; and Graham Collective, Joshua Tree, among others. His work has been included in group exhibitions at Over The Influence, Los Angeles; Circle Culture Galleries, Berlin and Hamburg; Ruttkowski 68, Paris; and Annika Nutthall Gallery, Aarhus, Denmark. In 2026 his work was included in the Intersect Art & Design Fair, Palm Springs. »Travelling Light« at FIERMAN, New York, is his first exhibition with GOLESTANI. GOLESTANI at FIERMAN, 19 Pike St, 10002 New York, NY Hours: Thursday—Sunday, 12—6 p.m. contact: office@golestani.gallery phone: +49 151 20139991
