The United Gas Pipe Line Company Collection

UGPL 0023 Novros, David, untitled, fresco, 9′ x 27′, 1975 illus: pp 56-57

David Novros (1941- )

Written in 1976 for the catalog and reproduced as printed, with spelling corrected. Not current.

The Novros fresco, one of the major commissioned works of the United Gas Pipe Line Company Collection of Art, is the most recent achievement of a young artist who has risen to a place of prominence in the international art community. Critic Carter Ratcliffe has said that “Given a special opportunity, Novros was able to make innovations with a special importance to our notion of what painting is and might possibly be.”

David Novros was born in Los Angeles in 1941 and currently lives and works in New York City. His inclusion in a two-man show (with Brice Marden) at the Institute for the Arts, Rice University, in Houston in 1975, was the most recent in a distinguished career of exhibitions at major museums and galleries in New York, San Francisco, London, Hamburg, Dusseldorf, Stuttgart, and Houston. In 1966 he exhibited with Mark di Suvero at the Park Place Gallery, New York; at the Guggenheim Museum; and the Nelson-Atkins Gallery in Kansas City, and his work has been seen at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Documenta 5 exhibition at Kassel, Germany. The Corcoran Gallery included Novros in the 32nd Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting in 1971. These, and other major exhibitions, and a formidable bibliography of critical writing mark him as a major figure in contemporary art.

David Novros

This painting was made by applying pigment ground in water to a freshly laid coat of plaster. As the plaster cures, the pigment is incorporated to form a synonymous chemical structure. The wall is the painting and the painting is the wall. This technique is called “buon fresco” and means “true fresco.”

The demands of “place” must be married with the painting image from the inception—this is not a “picture” to be moved from place to place, but rather an image which exists in a specific environment, as irrevocable as a mountain mating with the sky—at least that is my ambition.

November 8, 1975

From The Art Collection of United Gas Pipe Line Company (Houston, 1976), curated by Susan Rush.