Over the Weather: David Row at Locks Gallery, Philadelphia
June 5 – July 24, 2026
“When you talk about water, aren’t you really talking about yourself? Isn’t water like the weather that way?” —Roni Horn
Let’s start with a few of David Row’s titles, just to settle into his moods: Acid Rain, Requiem, Study for Heat Wave III, Far From Home, Riptide, Study for Rising Tide… Weather, weather everywhere; that is, dread and danger. In Row’s world, we’re only ever at sea. He might say, “some weather we’re having,” but “having” here means something closer to having a party, having a baby, or having trouble. The weather we’re having is increasingly foul; ships are rising; lands lie lower and lower. We did this and are doing this, making this, having this.
At Locks Gallery we have a modest presentation of seventeen equally modest works. Just enough of Row from the last dozen or so years to evidence ambitions, projects, treatments, skills, concerns. But nothing that could fairly be considered peak or cream. Which isn’t the point. The show’s more like a chill-to-uncomfortably-warm hang with an artist doing their thing than a no-net high-wire act.
So, why bother? I’m here for most of it because Row puts hard geometric abstraction in touch with particular places and times, and he delivers bright, meaty oils that index flesh and blood exposure. The latter interest me most, but first I’ll demonstrate the former.
The gallery press release tells me that Row’s
… scribbled notations and occasional newspaper transfers onto the paint point to the world outside the studio—with some drawings tethered to the seventh floor of his New York studio building and others to the ocean near his residence in Maine. [emphasis added]
“Tethered” is a fine word; according to my dictionary, a tether is “a rope or chain with which an animal is tied to restrict its movement.” Row then would rather, even if only conceptually, restrict the movements of these works: they’re to orbit the time and place of their production, indexing these times and places through such scribbled notations and newspaper transfers: his hand remarks on its own passage, the newsprint preserves its once having been new. Not exactly On Kawara’s date paintings, Hanne Darboven’s calendars, or Hasan Elia’s Tracking Transience, Row’s works treat this data as peripheral halo rather than front-and-center concern. But the tethering does keep a steady rhythm and thus prompts questions about Row’s formal choices, about the shapes of the canvases and the dominant figures in the works on paper, but also the shapes inside these shapes.
Working from outside in, Row’s works blunt orientation. If all you have to go on are the shaped supports and limiting contours, you would quickly lose your bearings; there are no obvious indications as to the horizon, the ground, the walls, the floor; no gravity. Five-sided, six-sided, seven-sided polygons; no bilateral or other symmetries; no regularity; no edge absolutely parallel to either floor or ceiling—though in a few cases, the top edges are close. Yes, Row’s works are squat, mostly; more “landscape” than “portrait,” to cite the dumbest of smartphone shorthand. But inside these shapes are horizontal and vertical lines and orienting figures: the major axes of the typically thick ellipses aka life preservers aka ring buoys establish horizons. The edges misorient; the interiors promise bearing. Sure, the works on paper sit under glass in clean white rectangular frames and in the center of primed rectangular paper. But nothing about their contours stipulates orientation; only the geometries inside do, again and again. Seemingly without exception, they’re self-leveling works, gyroscopically precise, ever helpful, a preparator’s friend.
So, Row’s paintings are abstract the way clocks and compasses, maps and calendars, flags and signs are abstract. They’re abstract the way latitude and longitude, measured in degrees, minutes, and seconds, are abstract. Maps are already timepieces: we have gridded the earth, turning it into a globe, girding it with netted lines and clocked inscriptions, so-called “time differences.” We have measured and oriented the moving and turning earth against the apparently fixed stars. Maps and clocks transform our experience of this earth, offering indices that orient our bodies within it and to it. Latitude and longitude do not picture places; they make places findable, discoverable, mappable, handy. A compass does not picture the horizon; it gives a bearing to be measured against “true north”; turn your body, turn your head, look, walk, drive, set sail. A clock does not picture time; it coordinates our exposure to it, wakes us, tells us to go home, to go to bed, that we’re late, that someone won. Maritime warning signs don’t picture inclement weather, don’t represent storms, wind speeds, dangers; they indicate them, and they communicate only because of a rich semiotic system and precision of their placement: when anchored to a ship, to a shore, we know then and there what’s coming. Standards, measures, and systems reign.
Row’s paintings then are not abstract because they have left experience behind and below. His works are affirmative if impractical icons of these quintessentially practical abstractions. They freeze frame the form taken by our efforts to orient ourselves, and they reward us for wanting to find our way to them and around them, for fitting shape to wall and wall to home and home to world and world to mind. They may proffer some delicious perceptual confusions—are these ellipses actually tilted circles; are these geometrical figures convex or concave; are the edges and angles receding or advancing; are we to imagine these cropped ellipses continuing beyond the finite limits of the canvas and/or polygonal figure? Enjoy the playful wobble of your sense making or your seeing both what is and isn’t there—but more importantly, treat these works as misfit finding aids, good-enough benchmarks, cheery lessons in orienteering: labor rightly, and grounds and the upright postures of the governing spaces and the viewers are available; labor rightly and you’ll also feel an appropriate level of dread about the comings and goings of oceans. Popular advice: when feeling seasick, carsick, airsick—when your body loses its bearings, when the ground falls away or tilts, keep your eye on the horizon. Row isn’t tarrying with the negative; he isn’t sitting quietly in the ever darkening heat, queasy, cynical, resigned, under the weather, abandoning all quests and all orientation. His technical means, that is, drawing, straight edge, and the other compass, the drafting tool, share lineage with cartography, wayfinding, and design, and so he rejoins, if obliquely, painting to its more practical, instrumental siblings.
But now I have to return to Row’s surfaces and his actual edges and contours. The paintings may be steeped in systems—coordinates, diagonals, ellipses, Xs, zeroes, horizons, signs—and their promise, but they do not clean up well. Their colors, bright, primary, and chroma rich as they are, are also dragged, scumbled, incised, abraded, raked, squeegeed. Underpainted colors flash through damaged surfaces; the hardest edges are in fact so hard as to be brittle, jagged, worn, weathered. Row’s abstraction is therefore not the purity of basic geometry but the exposure of geometry and reckoning to use, atmosphere, touch, time, abuse. A weak dose of pathos, perhaps, but still worth the sip.
Up close, Untitled, Black & White (DR 1009), 2014, is a delicious mess—and then as clean as a white whistle at the tape line. In the painted white of the ellipsis, troweled smears of white and pink blend, seeping; a newsprint transfer is underneath but backwards and illegible; the text more stippled texture than typography, more gray matter; an equally gray block shows us a palimpsestic photograph; text and photo are aligned, oriented, horizons matching the framing. The arcs that make up the concentric ellipses are day-glo orange and carmine, the colors sharp and clear but the lines in no way zip-perfect. There are dull Latin crosses dug into the paint. There are vertical white smears in the black. It’s a symphony of accident, gleeful contamination, and paint as mushed sculptural material.
But it would be wrong to call these and other surface details either imperfections or errors. They’re clearly there to insist on the made-ness of these painted things, to insist on the artist’s constrained fury and expressive relation to fabrication, to insist that these objects are first (if not last) paintings, that is, artworks; they’re there to insist too on this more than practical dimension of artworks. Signs do their job when they move you along, when you follow them and let them dissolve into their meaning; signification requires the abstract ideality of the signifier. There are so many ways to write the letter “t”—but they’re all still t’s; the only differences that matter are the meaningful differences: as long as a “t” is not also and confusingly an “l” or an “i,” meaning finds its way. Similarly, you don’t stare at the compass, the map, the warning sign; you take a reading; you change course; you act. But artworks don’t (only) move you along; they aim to hold you; they aim to open a place and time of their own, a silence and stillness of their own; they aim to stubbornly obtrude, to insist on their delicate implacability. Row’s touch and facture slow everything down, invite you to walk up, lean in, soak up the blushes, bleeds, and scarring: his work, his hand, his balance, his measure. Much too on the nose: Row might throw you these life preservers, but he’s not trying to save you, himself, anyone else; he is asking you to wonder about arts and crafts of survival, holding on, head barely above water, clawing at the green and blue. And when you think about this more dangerous water, you’re really thinking about yourself.
Each year in Key West, on or around November 30th, a hurricane warning flag is doused with rum and burned to mark the end of the hurricane season—as said season becomes longer and longer, perhaps soonish, our only season. Celebrants don’t imagine that these small fires ward off such storms or that the flags are themselves storms and thus fitting objects for effigial vengeance. Burning the flags ends, temporarily and by increasingly faulty clocks and calendars, the current jurisdiction of these otherwise reliable signs. Burning them punctuates relief with a bit of joy, a bit of spectacle. For me, Row’s work begins nearby; his paintings are not warnings one can easily obey, and they are not signs one should burn once danger passes. They countersign these signs, answering them with calls of their own; they are similarly maritime, weathered, directional, damaged, still glowing and colorful, and unapologetically so, with the old imperative to take a bearing and have a bearing. But they do not tell us what to do or what we have done or where to go. They convert practical abstractions into something slower and less useful: they’re good for neither rescue, nor navigation, nor preparedness; good only for dwelling with the exposure those instruments are rightly assigned to manage. Row holds onto the signs after their term. Not abstraction as escape but as the bright afterlife of worthy worries.
 | A guest post by
|