DVAA Member since 2023

Derek Ayres

Website: derekayres.com

About:

Derek Ayres is a Philadelphia-based artist working in mixed media, egg tempera, and sculpture. He received his MFA in Sculpture from Columbia University and his BA in English and Visual Arts from Rutgers University.

His work has been exhibited at ZieherSmith and P.P.O.W. in New York, Bridgette Mayer Gallery and Da Vinci Art Alliance in Philadelphia, and in exhibitions and programs throughout the region. Ayres was a Da Vinci Art Alliance Resident Artist in February 2024. Recent exhibitions include Working Title and Collective Renderings of “We the People!” at Da Vinci Art Alliance, and Unlikely Pairs at Thirty-odd in Burlington, Vermont. His work has also been presented through Philadelphia Open Studio Tours and the Philadelphia Fringe Festival.

Ayres grew up in Houston, Texas, and has lived on the East Coast for more than forty years. His current work brings together imagery drawn from his Texas upbringing, art history, architecture, landscape, and American popular culture across painting, works on paper, and sculpture.

Artist Statement:

I make paintings, works on paper, and sculpture from the cultural residue of museums, modernist architecture, landscape painting, and a suburban Houston upbringing—Van Halen blasting from a pickup truck, TV dinners on table trays in wood-paneled rooms, shag carpet under a console TV, the asphalt parking lot after Friday night football. Today, after 40 years on the East Coast, I consider myself a domestic expatriate. In the studio, I am currently transplanting the imagery of the world that shaped me into unfamiliar surroundings, looking for throughlines between people, objects, and places that aren't supposed to belong together.

The works on paper begin as digital collages and are rebuilt by hand using watercolor, gouache, acrylic, graphite, and ink, often augmented with hand-drawn elements. The egg tempera paintings begin through digital ideation and image-making before being translated into weeks of layered observation, using a monastic medium to paint contemporary America. I have also recently returned to sculpture, the medium in which I originally trained, reconstructing familiar objects in wood and other materials and bringing imagery that has occupied the paintings back into physical space. I don't begin with ideas I want to illustrate. I begin with images that won't leave me alone. Meaning gets reverse engineered through making, looking, and revision.

The vernacular of that childhood doesn’t stay native for long. Looked at through the art-historical frame I’ve since acquired, a high school quarterback becomes David. A suburban couple negotiating a shared life inhabits Atalanta and Hippomenes, racing and distracted by the golden apple. The rooms they inhabit turn into a hallucinated mix of memory and reference, neither fully remembered nor fully invented. A go-kart abandoned mid-burnout on a living room floor sits beneath a buck trophy sprouting cherry blossoms. These aren't invented pairings so much as images that seem to have been waiting inside the material all along. None of this is intentional allegory. I’m not illustrating myths. The archetypes seem to already be there, waiting to crossfade and surface once the painting slows down enough to notice them.

I'm less interested in inventing strange worlds than uncovering the strange logic already hiding inside familiar ones. I want the work to feel discovered rather than designed, as if these images had always belonged together and the painting simply made that visible.