Hudson painter David Becker’s latest work, the Chimera Paintings, are an outgrowth of a drawing practice he has been exploring over the past four years. Becker grafts incongruous elements into imaginary figures, each suggesting a unique life. The paintings traverse the spectrum of abstraction and figuration, often using a scale of human proportion. The work investigates and critiques the modern visual world and how we experience it.

In his paintings and works on paper, David Becker riffs on twentieth-century Modernist trends like Cubism, Futurism, Metaphysical Painting, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. He manages, however, to transpose these aesthetic idioms into a twenty-first century visual language that reflects an idiosyncratic and unique vision. The hybrid forms that are central to his compositions appear at once machinelike and human. Likewise, pieces of furniture, and animal and vegetal shapes, merge, morph, and re-emerge as something otherworldly, yet wholly familiar. Becker concisely captures a moment of transmogrification.

Featured in the present exhibition, Yesterday’s Tomorrow, examples from Becker’s recent Chimera series clearly underscore the anthropomorphic attributes that the artist frequently assigns to inorganic matter. The word chimera, in Greek mythology, is derived from a she-monster hybrid with a goat’s body, serpent’s tail, and a lion’s head, and has come to mean an imaginary creature with incongruous elements. The images appear in perpetual flux, in terms of space as well as time. In the recent work, Becker imparts a contradictory archaic-futuristic sensibility befitting the exhibition’s title.