Artists Space

David Armstrong
Portraits

March 13 – May 23

Artists Space presents the first US survey of photographer David Armstrong (1954–2014). Portraits will illuminate Armstrong’s studied and experimental approach to the medium centered on an expansive deployment of portraiture, through which he transformed seemingly mundane landscapes, still lifes, and fashion imagery into vessels of intimacy, desire, and loss.

The exhibition brings together 80 photographs made between the 1990s and the 2010s, comprising primarily vintage prints. Portraits will include sequences that closely echo those that the artist developed in his photographic workbooks and earlier shows, while also including a major installation first shown in 2004. The exhibition will trace Armstrong’s artistic progression and the ways in which he mined his own aesthetic foundations to find new directions forward.

An out-of-focus photograph of a wooden chair in a golden-lit room decorated with curtains, a carpet, and a framed artwork leaning against the back wall.
David Armstrong, Jefferson Ave, Brooklyn 1997, 1997, Cibachrome
© David Armstrong. Courtesy of the David Armstrong Estate
[An out-of-focus photograph of a wooden chair in a golden-lit room decorated with curtains, a carpet, and a framed artwork leaning against the back wall.]

David Armstrong (b. 1954, Arlington, MA, d. 2014, Los Angeles, CA) attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he began to practice photography, leading to his association with the “Boston School.” In 1977, he moved to New York City and had his first exhibition, together with Nan Goldin, at Hudson Gallery. His work was shown in the influential New York/New Wave exhibition at P.S. 1 (1981) and was later featured in Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space (1989), curated by Nan Goldin. Scalo Verlage Zürich has published three volumes of his photographs: A Double Life. David Armstrong/Nan Goldin (1994), The Silver Cord (1997), and All Day Every Day (2002). A major exhibition of his work was presented at Kunsthalle Zürich in 2024, and traveled to LUMA Arles in 2025, where it is on view until March 29, 2026. The book David Armstrong Contacts, focusing exclusively on his previously unpublished contact sheets from 1974 to 1994, was published by Mack in 2025 in conjunction with the Zürich and Arles exhibitions.

Exhibition support for David Armstrong: Portraits is provided by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Support for Artists Space exhibitions and programs is provided by Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council, The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Keith Haring Foundation, I.A. O'Shaughnessy Foundation, Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, Lotos Foundation, The David Rockefeller Fund, and the Friends of Artists Space.

David Armstrong: Portraits was realized in collaboration with the David Armstrong Estate.

    A figure lays face up on a white mattress. His expression is languid and his hair falls over the edge of the mattress.
    David Armstrong, Koos, 2003, C-print
    © David Armstrong. Courtesy of the David Armstrong Estate
    [A figure lays face up on a white mattress. His expression is languid and his hair falls over the edge of the mattress.]