Lola Montes and David McDermott

Mountains, like friendships, are forged. And the rarest friendships, like mountains, endure. It is in this spirit that Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the joint exhibition of David McDermott and Lola Montes, opening July 27 in St. Moritz, two artists whose friendship spans four decades: the elder McDermott acting as a catalytic beacon and constant supporter of the younger Montes in the process of discovering her artistic practice.

McDermott, an artist whose work has been exhibited internationally since the 1980s, presents his latest pictures in richly encoded paintings of mountains from around the world, extending this eternal theme in art through the lens of the Aesthetic Movement. McDermott’s emphatic insistence on the beautiful, the miraculous, looks beyond promises of techno-modernity to mirror themes of 19th century artists’ rejection of the Industrial Revolution, a collision that would drive creative forces both to retreat from this “brave new world” and simultaneously push forward to unexplored faraway lands. Crafted with painstaking devotion using the finest materials, McDermott melds his voluminous understanding of past traditions into a precisely colored palimpsest of each mountain’s respective elemental iconography. His is an aerial vision of aspiration, creating inspiring icons of what the viewer has yet to attain.

Montes takes the subterranean route, excavating rare clays and pigments from the earth itself, remainders and chthonic reminders of the eruption of Mt. Etna which looms near her studio in Sicily. In uncovering these hidden materials then fusing them both through the flames of her unconscious vision and the searing heat of clay-firing kilns, Montes’ amalgam of exacting ancient techniques yields results unknown even to her until the work’s completion. In these blindfolded acts of imaginative epiphany, her work is a windswept ascent to the summit: a topological dreamscape of myth and emotion.

They are the physical and sculptural nature of drawing woven through mud and then sifted into the delicate and gossamer sheen of faience - a miraculous high wire act.

What is even more miraculous however, is when the smile of The Fates brings two kindred spirits together, separated by generations, in a lifelong friendship of flourishing adventure and seeking, with them - and us - as the grateful beneficiaries of the treasures they bring home to share.

Like mountains and all rare friendships, this exhibition is a revelation.

Opening July 27, 2024, The Great Mountain Paintings 1888 & Landscapes From The Underworld will be on view at Vito Schnabel Gallery, St. Moritz through September 15, 2024.