Dominic Chambers has focused much of his career on painting places with space. There is always a sense that his characters are thinking about or trying to get themselves into either a physical or spiritual place where there is room to breath. To be free. To have arms outstretched and a place to run. When I interviewed him in 2020, he told me, "I am a very active person. That was something that really got me: I'm totally complicit in this hyperactivity, 24/7 thing. I was in that system. And I do think it's incredibly unfulfilling in a sense. Where you don't know how to catch up with yourself. And someone who's seemingly stable, or people who have their shit together, have often fought for taking time for themselves, you know?"
So to see the works that are now his major debut in NYC in Leave Room for the Wind at Lehmann Maupin, it doesn't surprise me that he is focusing on flight and the wind; the idea of being carried away not only by activities of childhood and kite-flying, and the aesthetic of magical realism. Flight evokes freedom, or a challenge to gravity, overcoming this planet in a way. And I think Chambers has always been a dreamer that way, creating worlds where there is something both universally and earthly desired, but almost of the realm of make-believe. It's challenging and emotional work. —Evan Pricco
