David Haxton (b. 1943, Indiana, USA; lives and works in Florida)

David Haxton’s most canonical works were a series of sixteen 16mm films shot in the negative on a Bolex camera. In each film, the artist or a performer carries out a series of simple actions in the studio that engage with the 2-dimensionality of the film frame. The films explore flatness, dimensionality, and optical illusion. Jonas Mekas, the influential filmmaker and theorist, described Haxton’s works in the Village Voice in 1975 as “The most inventive exploration of negative-positive possibilities and illusions that I’ve seen in film.”

Moving Picture Screens (1974)

In this never exhibited film installation, the artist manipulates and moves two screens around his studio, moving them from filling the full field of vision to being arranged side by side in the back of the space. Trained as a painter, this work engages with Haxton’s engagement with the apparatus of painting – easels and canvas – as he explores the dimensionality of the filmic picture plane.

Bringing Lights Forward (1970)

Is the first of Haxton’s canonical set of films. Meditative and poetic, it captures the performer turning lights on and off and shifting them forward in the studio. Because black and white are reversed in the negative, light appears as black spots, and the usual spatial references are rendered oblique.

Untitled, Diptychs (1976)

At the time that Haxton was creating the films, he also began making photographs. OFFSCREEN premieres a series of never exhibited vintage diptychs the artist created on the film sets, using the remnants of his performances – the light bulbs, the torn and cut paper, and more.

David Haxton is a filmmaker and photographer. In the 1970s and 80s Haxton exhibited in all of the major spaces for experimental film: The Anthology Film Archives (1976), the Museum of Modern Art’s renowned Cineprobe series (1978), the Whitney (1975, 1978, 1979, 1981, 1983, 2015). And his photography and films were exhibited in New York and Paris with Sonnabend gallery.

Select recent group exhibitions include Teatrino di Palazzo Grassi, Venice (2022), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2019), KANAL – Centre Pompidou, Brussels (2018), Pirelli Hangarbicocca, Milan, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2015). Haxton’s work is held in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, SFMOMA, San Francisco, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Albright Knox Gallery, National Gallery of Art, Canberra, Australia, MoMA, New York, Kadist Foundation, Polaroid Collection, and the Chicago Art Institute.

Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach represents major contemporary artists including Lita Albuquerque, Alice Anderson, Joana Vasconcelos, and the Estate of Carlos Cruz-Diez. Recent exhibitions include Alfredo Jaar, Lebohang Kganye and Gordon Matta-Clark.

In a listed historic building in the Saint-Gilles district in Brussels, it presents monographic exhibitions in its 1000m2 main museum-like central Nave, alongside two other exhibition spaces: the Glass Roof and the Project Room. The gallery was founded in 2015 by Valérie Bach.