David Kimball Anderson

David Kimball Anderson

David Kimball Anderson’s work is bold and graceful, respectful and spiritual. A practicing Buddhist and avid surfer as well as a sculptor, Anderson has given way to 4 decades of work that revere beauty in nature and beauty in industry within his signature aesthetic. For Anderson, steel girders, dry leaves, machine parts and distant train lights are equally as compelling as strawberry flowers, begonias, Asian antiquities and the night sky. Editing down to essential form while adding a touch of embellishment allows his work to embody both minimalist formal truth and decorative adornment. Anderson’s art practice is a beauty-driven way of knowing the world.

MaLin Wilson commented in her catalogue essay, DAVID ANDERSON - MY TIBET,
“[Anderson] has called forth an entirely new order of object…and it seems to come directly from his solar plexus. These messages are not intellectual, but they are intelligence: they are not loaded with the postmodern infection of irony, but they are extremely complex. They are stirrings of intelligence that we rarely hear from and that seem essential to being fully human.”

David Kimball Anderson was born in 1946 in Los Angeles. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute from 1967 to 1971, exploring abstract and conceptual ideas under James Reineking and Bruce Nauman. In 1971, he began a three-year apprenticeship with Peter Voulkos at his foundry in Berkeley, California. Anderson has been awarded three National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (1974, 1981 & 1988), a Pollock-Krasner Grant (1986) and was awarded a residency at the John Michael Kohler Art Center (1993). Anderson has been widely exhibited in the United States including group exhibitions in the Whitney Museum of America Art (1975), San Diego Museum of Art (1980), Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe (1991), San Jose Museum of Art (2003) and one-person exhibitions in SFMOMA (1973), Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara (2001) and the Salt Lake Art Center, Salt Lake City (2007). Anderson lives and works in Santa Cruz, California. His works are included in the collections of the Albright-Knox Museum, Museum of Fine Arts Santa Fe, Oakland Museum, San Antonio Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.