David Abbott
11 June —
26 July 2026
David Abbott Ships in the Forest
MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY
Ships in the Forest
Ships in the Forest brings together a body of work shaped by sustained attention to the contemporary landscape — its beauty, its ambivalence, and its quiet instability. Created following David Abbott’s receipt of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the exhibition marks a significant development in the artist’s practice, introducing a new body of large-scale works.
The exhibition takes its title from a centuries-old folk song, reflecting Abbott’s longstanding interest in folk music as a carrier of collective memory and human experience. Inspired in part by a walk along The Ridgeway — one of Britain’s oldest pathways — the paintings emerge from the artist’s confrontation with a rapidly changing landscape shaped by industrial development, expanding infrastructure, and visible environmental pressure.
Where Abbott’s earlier works might have dissolved place into memory and dreamlike association, the paintings in Ships in the Forest confront landscape as something possessing its own force and autonomy. Richer color, bolder compositions, and a heightened physicality characterize the works, embracing uncertainty and process rather than fixed ideas or narrative. For
Abbott, the landscape is no longer simply a vessel for personal projection, but something with its own force, history, and voice.
Though rooted in specific locations across southern England, the paintings resist straightforward depiction. Working primarily from photographs and extended encounters with place, Abbott searches for what the Welsh word hiraeth describes: a longing for something lost, or perhaps never possessed at all. In Ships in the Forest, Abbott’s paintings quietly acknowledge the fragility of the natural world and the mounting pressures placed upon it, while remaining deeply attentive to moments of wonder, mystery, and renewal.
David Abbott was born in 1981 and grew up in Hertfordshire, UK, before moving to Virginia as a teenager, where he attended high school and university. He received his BA in Fine Art from James Madison University in 2004. He then returned to the UK and received his MA in Multidisciplinary Printmaking at the University of the West of England in 2007. Abbott worked as a graphic designer until 2021 when he took up painting full-time. He has shown widely in the UK, Europe, and North America. Today, Abbott lives and works in Bristol, UK.
In My Father’s Garden, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
Since Love Can Enter an Iron Door, 2025
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
The Week Before Easter, 2026
Acrylic on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
Lilly of the Valley, 2026
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
Present Storms, 2026
Beyond
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
The Wind Blows Where it Wishes, 2025
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
Bells of Paradise, 2025
Oil on canvas
39 1/2 x 63 inches
Light the Way, 2024
Oil on panel
13 3/4 x 22 inches
What Was Said Shall Never Be Known, 2025
Oil on panel
13 3/4 x 22 inches
Listen In, 2024
Oil on canvas
10 x 14 inches
Which Ghosts Do See, 2024
Oil on canvas
10 x 14 inches
Shall Be Well Again, 2025 Oil on panel
8 1/2 x 13 3/4 inches
Time Passes Over, 2026
The
Oil on panel
6 x 8 inches
O Where Are You Bound, 2024
x 8 inches
Oil on panel
5
Artist Statement
Two Easters ago I went for a walk along The Ridgeway, one of Britain’s oldest tracks running almost ninety miles from the stonecircle-enclosed village of Avebury in Wiltshire to the Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire. From this ancient route trodden by a patchwork of travellers, pilgrims, soldiers and drovers I saw a landscape being altered at pace. Fulfilment warehouses bigger than villages and silvery, snaking motorways wider than rivers. I saw the huge forces of an ultra-rapacious modernity coming to bear on our ancient landscapes, and by extension on our own spirits.
Before this walk I had been applying my own forces to painting, bringing work out of ideas or heaving them up from wells of feeling. Landscapes by will, combining seeing with memory to extend the reality of a known, actual place into some kind of myth. A song on the breeze.
The post-Ridgeway paintings are not quite the reverse, but closer to how landscapes actually are: fashioned by outside forces. Harsh or delicate but always resolutely formed and not conjured. Shortly after my walk I wrote that my response to the shock of seeing the stricken landscape should be to make work not simply find it. As such, the alchemy of time, attention and a more direct communion with the work are the threads that knits this body of paintings together. These works represent very clear pictures of inner states formed not so much by myth but by everyday forces of sorrow and joy.
Despite the Ridgeway origins, the views on show are taken from other places across the south of England. Whilst they pause to glance back over their shoulders, they are more determinedly located by a faith in the forces that shape the ever-unfolding present. - David Abbott
DAVID ABBOTT
David Abbott (b.1981) lives and works in Bristol, UK. He grew up in Hertfordshire, moving to Virginia, USA as a teenager where he attended high school and university before returning to the UK in 2004. He has exhibited work in the UK, Europe and North America.
EDUCATION
2007 MA Multidisciplinary Printmaking, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK
2004 BA Studio Art, James Madison University, Virginia, USA
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2026 Ships in the Forest, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA
2024 Brighter Fields, Maya Frodeman Gallery, Jackson Hole, Wyoming, USA
2023 By and By, Nationale 8, Brussels, Belgium
2022 A Certain Day, That Art Gallery, Bristol, UK
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 A Day in May, John Martin Gallery, Suffolk, July Altitude I, Noble and Common, Worcester,
2024 Close, That Art Gallery, Bristol Emerging Landscape Painting Today (online), Messums
The Lido Open, Lido Stores, Margate, UK, curated by Kristen Healy and Vincent Hawkins
Uncarved Block, Unbleached Silk, 30 Tottenham
Street, London, UK, curated by Matilda Liu
South by South West, Gurr Johns, London, curated by Lewis Dalton Gilbert & Emily Andrew
2023 Novus, (Three-person) Bark Berlin, Germany
We Share The Same Sky, Vortic, online, curated by Lewis Dalton Gilbert
Staged Nature, Glyndebourne, Lewes, UK
Things Seen, Make Room, Los Angeles, USA, curated by Patrick Zapien
2022 Evermore, (Duo) Nationale 8, Brussels, Belgium
Time, Being, (Three-person). Irving Contemporary, Oxford, UK
2021 Winter Group Show, Linden Hall Studio, Deal, Kent, UK
It’s A Small World, Circle Contemporary, Cornwall, UK
A Tiny Bit of Fire, Warbling Collective, Fitzrovia Gallery, London, UK
MAYA FRODEMAN GALLERY
66 SOUTH GLENWOOD STREET
JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING
TEL 307 733 0555
This catalog complements David Abbotts’s exhibition
Ships in the Forest
Maya Frodeman Gallery
11 June - 26 July 2026
Images courtesy of the artist
© 2026 All Rights Reserved
Listen In, (detail), Oil on canvas
