DAVID FRAZER
(Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
229 Hamilton Ave
Palo Alto, CA 94301
info@qualiagallery.com www.qualiagallery.com
Qualia Contemporary Art
Installation View: David Frazer: Mirage
INTRODUCTION
DAVID FRAZER
“Paint can be controlled but I prefer chaos. I use imagery and encourage accidents that inspire reflection and interpretation. These paintings are visual poems and I choose not to make the process predictable or the meaning specific but simply offer an opportunity for reflection.”— David Frazer
David Frazer’s paintings are both meditative and restless. His process continues the lineage of Cezanne, Morandi, and Guston–artists who understood painting as a form of cognition. Echoing these predecessors, Frazer insists on the viability of painting as a rigorous, adventurous practice, one capable of unveiling meaning through the act of painting itself.
Frazer paints improvisationally, approaching each canvas as something to be rewritten in the moment. Each stroke or wash of color is rhythm, rhyme, and meter. The resulting paintings are layers of textures, colors, and forms, as if each canvas were a Rorschach layered upon Rorschach; imagery emerges and dissolves, planes converge into new textural realities. Certain motifs surface within the abstraction: eggs as vessels of fragility and rebirth, tulips in homage to his wife Anneke, and birds as meditations on freedom and transience. Each painting is a durational process, absorbing Frazer’s emotional state as he paints. The works are meditative, even with moments of frenzy, ecstasy, precarity, planes, shapes, motifs, and textural elements co-existing in tight balance.
With his solo exhibition Mirage, Frazer extends his established body of work while introducing new variations in scale and approach, reaffirming the role of abstraction and discovery in a contemporary art world often dominated by distraction.
“Craft is the developed skill of what has been done while art is the developed exploration of what hasn’t been done yet or seen before or understood already. Craft is important to me but art is the goal.” — David Frazer
After the Fall, 2025
60 x 42 in | 152.4 x 106.7 cm
Oil on canvas
Twilight, 2025 Oil on canvas
40x36 in | 101.6 x 91.4 cm
32 x 20 in | 81.3 x 50.8 cm
Chromatic Gray, 2025 Oil on canvas
Installation View: David Frazer: Mirage (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
Pictured (left to right): Chromatic Gray, 2025; After the Fall, 2025; Reflection II, 2019
32 x 32 in | 81.3 x 81.3 cm
Improv #14, 2022
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 in | 152.4 x 121.9 cm
Reflection II, 2019
Oil on canvas
40 x 36 in | 101.6 x 91.4 cm
Stone Slate, 2024
Oil on canvas
30 x 30 in | 76.2 x 76.2 cm
Love Dearly, 2025
Oil on canvas
Installation View: David Frazer: Mirage (Open Oct 25 – Dec 6, 2025)
Pictured (left to right):
Ab. #9 Scaffold; Ab. #4 Terrace; Ab. #5 Huanghe; Ab. #2 Fractured, Ab. #7 Riff, Ab. #6 Nocturne; 2025 City Life, 2024; Chromatic Grey, 2025
10 x 10 in | 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ab. #2 Fractured, 2025
Oil on panel
Oil on panel
10 x 10 in | 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ab. #4 Terrace, 2025
Oil on panel
10 x 10 in | 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ab. #5 Huanghe, 2025
Oil on panel
10 x 10 in | 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ab. #6 Nocturne, 2025
Oil on panel
10 x 10 in | 25.4 x 25.4 cm
Ab. #9 Scaffold, 2025
DAVID FRAZER
Lives and works in Providence, RI
David Frazer, Professor Emeritus of Painting, Fine Arts Division, Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), taught at RISD from 1978 to 2020. He received his BFA in Painting from RISD in 1970 in painting and his MA in Painting from University of New Mexico (UNM) in 1976. He has exhibited across the United States, including: Gallery at Four, Tiverton, RI, in 2021 and 2019, the Chazan Gallery, Providence, RI, 2018, Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI, and at the Stanford Faculty Club, Stanford University, in 2016, the Nancy Devine Gallery, RI 2023 and 2024, and recently the Chinese Embassy, Washington D.C. and the United Nations, NYC in 2025.
In 1969-70, as an undergraduate, he was chosen to participate in the RISD European Honors Program (EHP) in Rome, Italy. During that year, he travelled primarily in Italy and Holland. His early interest in Flemish painting was then heavily influenced by the frescoes of Giotto in Padua and particularly the frescoes of Piero della Francesca, Arezzo. Their colors and combination of realism and abstraction still influence his aesthetic.
In 1978, he began teaching at RISD. He was appointed to the position of Chief Critic to the RISD Rome Program, the first alumnus of that program to become its Chief Critic and professor in residence, from 1995-98. He continued to return to Rome and teach summer courses in painting and drawing at the Palazzetto Cenci Roma for the next eight years.
In 1989, he conducted sponsored research at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou, China, now the Central Academy of Art (CAA). He has had many trips to China, with visits and lectures in Tianjin and Shenyang, and shows in 2014 in Beijing and Shenyang. Recent museum exhibitions in China include Hangzhou and Jinan in 2017, travelling exhibitions in Beijing, Urumqi, and Karamay in 2017, and travelling exhibitions in Urumqi, Hami, and Beijing in 2018.