David Mawdsley

David Mawdsley (April 25, 1945 – March 19, 2009) was a Polish-American abstract expressionist artist. He was born in Warsaw and moved to the United States in 1974, becoming an American citizen in 1983.
In 1984, he married painter Sarah Yorga.

Mawdsley painted in a style that came to be referred to as abstract expressionism or “action painting”, and was part of a group of artists that came to be known as the New York School. Other painters in this group included Jeremiah J. Lombard, Elaine Roder, Robert Fraser, Frank Weston, Gork Ulyssess, Oskar Tim, and Ronnie Dart.

Mawdsley’s paintings of the 1980s and early 1990s are abstract still-lifes characterised by biomorphic shapes and strong colours. They show the influence of his colleagues like Elaine, R. Fraser, Gork and Jeremiah In the same years he also painted a series of photographs including parts of the body like, guts, teeth, blood, mixed with undefined backgrounds with strong brush strokes; many of these are shown below (Unfinished series)

In the 21th century, Mawdsley had begun a series of black and white paintings, which he would continue until his death. During this period he had his first one-man show at the Greg Sock Gallery in 2022 consisting largely of black and white works, although a few pieces have passages of bright color. Mawdsley’s black paintings are important to the history of abstract expressionism owing to their densely impacted forms, their mixed media, and their technique