DAVID BAILIN is an artist working primarily in drawing. He received his MA from Hunter College in New York and his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the NEA / Mid-American Arts Alliance as well as the Arkansas Art Council. Bailin was given a solo exhibition in 2000 at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts in Little Rock and at the Visual Arts Center at the Washington Pavilion of Arts and Science in Sioux Falls, South Dakota in 2009. His work has been acquired by a number of public institutions including the Arkansas Art Center Foundation Collection in Little Rock, and the National Jewish Museum in Washington D.C. Bailin has received critical reviews in ARTnews, Los Angeles Times, LA Weekly, the Oxford American Magazine, Art Ltd and other periodicals, and was the subject of a 2008 documentary entitled “Charcoal Lines.” His work is included in the fourth edition of Drawing Essentials by Deborah Rockman, published in 2020 by the Oxford University Press, and Creative Practices for Visual Artists by Kenneth Steinbach, published in 2018 by Focal Press. The 2020 Drawing Discourse 11th Annual exhibition includes two drawings from Bailin’s Erasing series. He was selected by the Arkansas Times weekly as one of Arkansas’ Visionaries in 2014.
Bailin is represented by Koplin Del Rio Gallery, Seattle, WA (formerly Los Angeles, 1982 - 2015), and M2 Gallery, Little Rock, AR. David Bailin currently lives and works in Wellfleet, MA.
In his artist statement about his current drawing series, "The Erasing," Bailin, 62, writes: "As an artist who witnessed the waning of my father’s personhood through the dissolution of his memory, I wrestled with how to convey the devastating personal and human experience of memory loss without relying on visual clichés." The answer to that question is revealed in the creative process of the artworks of "The Erasing": draw, erase part of the drawing, repeat, repeat, repeat.
— Ellis Widner • Into The Void • 2017
The drawings in [this series] are ephemeral and dreamlike, […] and the figures and settings emerge out of Bailin’s marks—marks of abstraction, gesture, texture, and motion—as if surfacing within one’s consciousness out of white noise. […] His works skirt the edge of abstraction...
— Christopher Michno • Exhibition Review • art ltd, 2014
[Bailin's] interiors and landscapes made since 2001 are as likely to resonate with texts by Eco or Borges as with anonymous images plucked from old magazines and newspapers. […] Bailin approaches each blank page as if a theatrical space to be occupied, activated. Each sheet becomes the site of a performance—Bailin’s own gestural charcoal dance and his character’s parallel search for a place, a form, a moment of reprieve.
— Leah Ollman • Catalog Essay • 2008
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