Dave Walsh
Dave Walsh: Viewshed
January 15 – February 27 2026
Reception: Thursday, January 15th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM
Bookstein Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent paintings by Dave Walsh. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The paintings in this exhibition continue the artist’s dialogue with the Hudson River School. Like those painters, Walsh’s landscapes are focused on areas in and around the Catskills in New York state. This was an area of great importance for 19th century painters like Thomas Cole and Frederic Chrurch, whose depictions of the region helped to establish what they deemed to be a distinctly American art that propagated the young nation’s vast, natural beauty with divine favor and the promise of Manifest Destiny. Like an embedded journalist, Walsh spends extended time hiking, camping and immersing himself within the location in order to develop a somatic relationship with the environment in addition to studying its rich history. But ultimately, the artist’s overarching concern with abstract principles of composition and positive/negative space dominate the work.
While the Hudson River School often romanticized views of the American landscape, Walsh has focused on viewpoints and subjects that are obstructed, blocking otherwise traditionally expansive vistas. The viewer is confronted by a massive boulder that fills the picture plane in Erratic and gnarled pine branches impede the view in Inspiration Point. In a similar reversal, Walsh has chosen to paint these scenes covered in snow and ice, making once familiar and inviting views seem foreign and austere. The golden light that filled the canvases of the Hudson River School is now cast in a strikingly cool palette of blues and purples. These reversals can be seen as engaging with the metaphors that addressed the turmoil of the civil war and propagated westward expansion in the 19th Century. Almost 200 years later, the artist reflects on these unresolved histories and the eerily similar reverberations of brutality and conflict in American society today.
Dave Walsh (b. 1987, Scranton, PA) received his BFA from the Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia and his MFA from the Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. Walsh was a 2015-16 Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA. He is the recipient of two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants (2021 and 2023) and the F. Lammot Belin Grant. He is the Assistant Professor of Art and Design, Painting and Drawing at Purchase College, SUNY, Purchase, NY. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn.
Dave Walsh: Viewshed will be on view from January 15 – February 27, 2026. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 15th from 6:00 – 8:00 PM. Gallery hours are Monday through Friday, 11:00 am to 6:00 pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or by email at info@booksteinprojects.com.