SoVA Anderson Lecturer
David Hytone
Anderson Lecture – April 7, 2026
David Hytone received his BFA in Fine Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design after studying briefly at the Osaka University of Arts in Osaka, Japan. He has exhibited both nationally and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, including shows in Brussels and Ghent, Belgium, New York, Seattle, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Portland and Des Moines, Iowa (where he was born back in the Paleolithic era). A recent visiting artist and lecturer at the J. Miller School of Architecture at the University of Indiana, he has work in numerous private and corporate collections including Microsoft, Facebook, Capital One, Swedish hospitals, Hilton and the permanent collection of King County, WA.
A 2024 McDowell Fellow and finalist for the 2018 Neddy Award in Painting, David’s work has been featured in many publications including Harper’s, Luxe, Seattle Met, and the final issue of Modern Painters magazine (coincidence or causation? You decide). He currently lives and works in Tacoma, WA with his brilliant and heroically patient wife Bridget and their poorly-behaved pug, Quincy. His next solo exhibition opens at Studio 23 in Belgium November 2025. David is clearly unafraid of tangents, parenthetical asides and run-on sentences, but continues to be uncomfortable referring to himself in the third person.
Artist's Statement
"When I enter the studio, I try not to begin with an idea as much as I endeavor to arrive at one."
I’ve been thinking about the notion of the self as an aggregate of separate identities, cobbled loosely together from the disparate facades we present both to the world and ourselves. This is not only reflected in the imagery in my work, but is also the result of my process, as much of the work is constructed from hundreds of individual pieces of hand-painted paper.
Approaches in the studio involve several “off-canvas” processes: glass-plate dry transfer, crude monoprint techniques, and the creation of myriad types of painted surfaces. These techniques often rely on activities of transference and obfuscation, resulting in imagery that’s compromised or incomplete, prompting me to consider how memory informs and is informed by the dynamic construction of the self.
Often casting my work through the lens of theater and still life, I’ve been intrigued with the idea of reality as performance. Studies in quantum physics have suggested that light and matter behave differently depending on whether or not they are being observed. A poetic reading of this renders the world around us essentially a facade or something akin to a shifting theater set.
For some time now, these are some of the intertwined themes my practice has asked me to consider. Hence, the work has come to focus on the rather absurd stances the human psyche manages to get itself into as it navigates this unsteady ground beneath our collective feet.
Thematic branches invariably appear. Often I’ve encouraged myself to follow these tributaries, and have found myself using new approaches, with decreased interest in uniformity of style or technique. New approaches in the studio bring new questions. Often those questions are far reaching; recently they’ve become more personal in nature, prompting yet new approaches.
Ultimately, these processes are the conduit to my inquiries, implicitly informing the thematic thrust of the work rather than being the product of it. I am not seeking to illustrate what intrigues me, only to reveal my rather absurd path of inquiry. When I enter the studio, I try not to begin with an idea as much as I endeavor to arrive at one.