Upcoming Exhibitions
JULY 4 - OCTOBER 25, 2025
DAVID SPRIGGS
Known for his pioneering work at the intersection of sculpture, painting, and spatial illusion, David Spriggs challenges the boundaries of perception through his large-scale, multi-layered compositions. Constructed from transparent images layered to form three-dimensional visual phenomena, his installations appear to float and shift as viewers move around them.
The exhibition features the following two major works:
https://davidspriggs.art/artwork/
• First Wave (2021), created during the height of the pandemic for the Oku-Noto Triennale in Suzu, Japan. Although it was installed overseas, travel restrictions prevented Spriggs from attending, making its North American debut this exhibition marks the first time David Spriggs will see the work in its entirety. First Wave will be displayed in the Main Gallery.
• Paradox of Power (2007), A significant early work, this pivotal piece investigates rapid change, deconstruction, and symbolic revolution. Eighteen years on, it remains strikingly relevant, having taken on a renewed sense of gravitas considering today’s political climate, both in North America and around the globe. Paradox of Power will be displayed in the Project Gallery
Together, these two ambitious works explore themes of transformation, impermanence, and collective consciousness. Through his unique visual language, Spriggs invites audiences to confront both the seen and unseen forces shaping our world, from the fluidity of identity to the architecture of power.
Exhibition Details
Opening Reception: Friday, July 4, 2025 | 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM (David will be in attendance)
Artist Talk and Tour: Saturday, July 5, 2025 | 1:00 PM
Location: Penticton Art Gallery | 199 Marina Way, Penticton, BC
Exhibition Dates: July 4 – October 25, 2025
Admission: By donation
Main Gallery: First Wave
‘First Wave’ by David Spriggs is a Stratachrome artwork that was created during the COVID-19 pandemic and exhibited at the Oku-Noto Triennale in Suzu, Japan. Intense red colour flows through the space of a former fishing net warehouse in Suzu, the artwork is not projected light but a three-dimensional painting of painted layered transparencies. It is a stratachromatic representation of the beauty and power of nature using aesthetics to create an emotional response in the viewer. The artwork is made up of 90 transparent sheets painted with red paint, layered to create the appearance of a massive, incoming tsunami wave. The intense saturation of the red color, as well as its association with blood, adds to the emotional impact of the piece. The title of the artwork, ‘First Wave’, references both the current pandemic and to Japanese art history, specifically the famous Hokusai print, ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’.
Title: First Wave
Artist: David Spriggs
Size: 382 x 107 x 150 inches / 970 x 271 x 381 cm
Materials: Acrylic paint on layered transparencies, lightbox, framework
(Photography credit: Kichirō Okamura)
Project Gallery: Paradox of Power
David Spriggs’ large-scale sculptural installation, The Paradox of Power, is an investigation of rapid change, deconstruction and symbolic revolution. In the same vain as the Futurists, Spriggs is interested in the representation of time and motion in the sculptural form. Using layering as a device, Spriggs has developed “an environment that breaks free from the laws that constrict both two and three-dimensional materials, bringing together painting, drawing, photography, digital-modeling, and sculpture, to create a spatial topographic system”… Spriggs has installed of a life-size model of a stratified bull, cut in two, with each end displayed in two adjacent cases, each a sublime eight feet high and ten feet wide. Spriggs’ investigation of the multiplicity of time and its relationship to the sculptural form is here transcribed in his an analysis of the bull as a semiotic agent. By literally deconstructing the bull through a layering of transparent stratum, the mythologized ‘power’ the bull represents is “fragmented, and reconstructed in an alternate reality.”The bull is rendered immobile, flipped upside down, legs in the air. The form is further transformed in the plastic anaglyphic binary colours of each half — a paradox of red and blue. This binary references not only the deconstructive possibilities of vision itself, but also an antithesis of power in the corporeality of the bull contained, divided and sacrificially immobilized.. Like Muybridge’s running horse, Spriggs uses the representation of serialized time to suggest a paradoxical ordering of symbolic power.
Title: Paradox of Power
Artist: David Spriggs
Size: 104 x 36 x 124 inches / 264 x 91 x 315 cm
Materials: Painted layered transparencies in display case
About David Spriggs
David Spriggs is an internationally acclaimed artist best known for his groundbreaking large-scale installations that blur the boundaries between two-dimensional painting and three-dimensional sculpture. At the core of his practice is a technique he pioneered in 1999 called Stratachrome. This process involves painting images on layers of transparent film and stacking them in precise sequences to create immersive, three-dimensional images that appear to float in space. His works are both sculptural and painterly, ephemeral and monumental.
Born in Manchester, England in 1978, Spriggs moved to Canada in 1992 and is currently based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University in Vancouver. His education includes residencies at Central St. Martin’s in London and Bauhaus University in Weimar.
Spriggs has exhibited globally at major museums, galleries, and biennales, including the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre (Paris), Oku-Noto Triennale (Japan), Sharjah Biennale (UAE), Noor Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), and the Powerlong Museum (Shanghai). His work is included in significant collections such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, and is permanently installed in landmark buildings worldwide.
In 2024, Spriggs was awarded the prestigious Académie des Beaux-Arts and Fondation Jacques Rougerie Award for Art in Paris. His work Red Gravity was also featured as cover art for Peter Gabriel’s song Panopticon, further cementing his influence in contemporary art and culture.
“Spriggs’ work invites us to see-with what is not actually there and to move-with the constellation of what we’re beginning to see. Moving-with perception composing itself, we experience the dynamics of an object becoming spacetime. We no longer simply observe – we are moved by the experience of watching, and we move with it. We note the contours but feel the colors. We see the lines but feel the rhythm. We see-with the becoming-work. This is the activity of plastic dynamism expressing itself through the emergence of a body-image constellation.”
Erin Manning. ‘Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy’ MIT Press
Artist David Spriggs with Piece ‘Red Wave’, 2023