Maya Frodeman Gallery is pleased to present Ships in the Forest, a solo exhibition of paintings by David Abbott. The exhibition brings together a body of work shaped by sustained attention to the contemporary landscape — its beauty, its ambivalence, and its quiet instability. Created following the artist’s receipt of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the exhibition marks a significant development in Abbott’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.
