David row was born in 1949 in Portland Maine. He studied at Yale University from 1968-1974 where he met fellow painter Al Held who would become a lifelong friend and mentor. Immediately following his studies he moved to New York City where he became a prominent member of a new young generation of abstract painters including Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley and Mary Heilmann. The artist is best known for his abstractions wrought with stark, architectonic precision in heavily worked surfaces of oil paint. His sumptuous, often delicate colors reflect a sensibility inherited from viewing the rich died fabrics he saw in markets while living with his parents as a young adult in India where his father moved to work as a city planner. He is known for his use of diptychs and more recently for his shaped polygonal canvases.
His works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including The Brooklyn Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. He has exhibited internationally including with Von Lintel Gallery in New York, with Brandstetter & Wyss , Zurich, Von Lintel and Nusser, Munich, Marella Arte, Milan, Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris and Andre Emmerich in New York. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, in New York, in May 2008.