Prone to Bruise

Sept. 28, 2024 – Jan. 12, 2025

Gallery Port at Brút Restaraunt — Reykjavik, Iceand

Opening Reception: Saturday, 28 September, 4-6 pm

Longtime friend of Iceland, David Molesky, debuts a new series of paintings — depicting bananas as the main characters — at Brut Restaurant in partnership with Gallery Port.

David has worked as a figurative painter for the last couple decades. He first began making work in Iceland in 2006/2007 at the old city library when it was owned by Odd Nerdrum. Recently, he has combined two tropes from art history – the hero and the banana — into an allegory to illustrate certain aspects of masculinity that are making the world bananas.

In the early months of the pandemic, while he was artist-in-residence at the Akureyri Art Museum, David made a painting of people in hazmat attending a human-sized banana. Arni Mar of Gallery Port, installed the painting at Brut where it became a point of conversation with visitors and staff alike who proposed theories of the painting’s meaning.

Initially the concept came to David in a flash when he saw a newspaper image of an ebola outbreak and he understood the potential expansion of the metaphor. There was a visual similarity to Renaissance deposition paintings including those of martyrs and saints. The celebrated aggrandizement of these male central protagonists inspired David to sometimes enlarge the banana to whale-sized proportions while exploring the gestural potential of peels anthropomorphized.

The exhibition at Brut will feature 10 of David’s newest paintings which will be displayed into the new year with the restaurant hosting a closing reception on Saturday 1/11/2025.