David Muenzer

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

Art can be an interface; I see exhibitions as particularly good occasions to bring conflicting worldviews into relation. Most recently, I've compared origin stories and ahistorical self-construction. Since 2019, I’ve frequently drawn globe-headed figures. These repurpose a preexisting visual language, cartooning, shifting my focus to inner life. In short, I treat them more like live performers than depictions. Inspired by Ralph Lemon’s parallel practices of choreography and narrative drawing, as well as juridical sketches from Daumier to courtroom illustration, I think of the globeheads as a gesture archive. My 2024 exhibition “Twin Study” considered inheritance through public record photographs of my grandparents’ Bengali wedding. Using gilded paper reliefs as well as globeheads, “Twin Study” examined both the power and arbitrary character of origin stories. As artist Jeffrey Stuker wrote in the exhibition text: “Here, as everywhere the immutable laws of nature are invoked, we find a quotient of social code in the genetic sequence.” Within the show, I organized a panel on heritability with Stuker, David Joselit, and Kelly Akashi. We discussed heirlooms and biological determinism, with Francis Galton–inventor of both eugenics and the normal distribution curve–as a negative lynchpin. My 2025 solo, “Teen,” followed a complementary practice in self-fashioning: ahistorical scrolling through possible identities. These globeheads drew from decontextualized pre-smartphone...

Artwork