Bio
David Goorevitch's career in photography spans four decades. Since 1974, his work has been dominated by the magical and the absurd. Obsessed with a passion for flattening the multi-layered images that speak to him, he creates images of urban life that haunt viewers with the richness of realities that are mostly unseen and unremembered, but not unlived.
In July 2006, he returned to photography after 25 years in the film business.
Beginning with a series of curated and juried shows, he has sold dozens of photographs to collectors worldwide. His most recent show, Puzzles & Findings, was a mid-career retrospective at the Black Dog Gallery in Thornbury. The Garden Show, his next exhibition, will launch June 23 in Toronto.
From the end of July to the end of 2007, several of David's landscapes will be on display at the Leonardo Gallery in Yorkville, where he is a gallery artist.
Included at the Leonardo will be some of his most recent work: a series of imaginary landscapes taken in Florida. Many of them can be seen on the website under "Findings." These are close-up photos of curbs and gutters; the pencil-like markings are "drawn" by either layered concrete or the rubberized markings of automobile tires.
None of David's works are created in Photoshop. All of these multi-layered images are the result of single photos of layered realities. For example, as David explains: "Louis Vuitton" takes in the shop window of the famous Paris headquarters, together with the reflection of Old Paris in the window. The combination of dressed up mannequins, the up-to-the-minute video screen, the intricately designed railing patterns (inside the store), the hard lines of the window itself, and the elegance of old Paris made this shot a mini-history of Paris' continual fascination with elegant design through the ages.
"Hot Wheels" is one I had a lot of fun with. I spent some time watching the reflections of moving chrome and steel on the corrugated plastic siding of a garden centre. From time to time they would combine to draw what looked like my grandfather's old car. I took a lot of these, but this one is the best."
David counts Andre Kertesz as his chief influence, along with Walker Evans, Edward Weston and Henri Cartier-Bresson. "I am not a documentarian at all; I am a commentator. But I don't cheat, because the power of photography lies in its truthfulness. So when beauty and magic can be shown to exist for one person in this world, it's a documentary fact that it can and does exist for everyone. You just have to make up your mind that you want it."
Before his life in the visual arts, David was a musician and music promoter.