Douglas Witmer

Douglas Witmer (b. 1971) is an artist based in Philadelphia. He is internationally known within the field of reductive abstract painting. Over a career now spanning three decades, Witmer has steadily pursued what he calls “a personal inquiry” into the materiality of the painted object, refining his processes to a set of consciously chosen, direct and economical actions.

Douglas Witmer’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions, including solo museum shows at The Midwest Museum of American Art in Elkhart IN (2023) and The Cornell Fine Arts Museum of Rollins College in Winter Park FL (2011). Other venues include: MoMA PS1, The Curator Gallery, and The Painting Center (all NYC), The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Bridgette Mayer Gallery (Philadelphia), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia), Hemphill Fine Arts (Washington, DC), ICON Contemporary Art (Brunswick, ME), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Gray Contemporary (Houston), Gebert Contemporary (Santa Fe), The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton, Galerie Biesenbach (Germany), ParisCONCRET (France), Galerie Mathias Mayr (Austria), Sydney Non-Objective (Australia), and Sol del Rio Arte Contemporanea (Guatemala City). His work is held in the collections of The Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, The Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart IN, The Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, The Columbus Museum, Columbus GA, and The Fellowship of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as numerous corporate and private collections internationally.

His work has been documented in publications by The Woodmere Museum of Art, The Free Library of Philadelphia, The Palmer Museum of Art at Penn State University, and The University of Manitoba press, and his exhibitions have been reviewed in The Washington Post, Two Coats of Paint, and Art New England, and other arts periodicals and websites.

Witmer has also curated numerous exhibitions in the United States mostly centered on themes and issues within the discipline of abstract painting.

Witmer holds a B.A. from Goshen College and an M.F.A. from The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Artist Statement

The subject of my work is presence. My goal with each painting is to establish a unique visual place offering an open invitation into a contemplative experience of seeing and feeling.

Nothing about my work is prescriptive. I have always approached my work as inquiry into the materiality of what paintings (painted objects) are, how their reality can feel, and where these feelings lead as a broader relationship.

Recent paintings are achieved through refined processes within the framework of reductive abstraction. I activate elemental compositional structures with sensuous color and various improvised gestural and incidental actions. Making a painting is an accrual relationship for me. From start to finish on a painting, my interactions with the surface are additive. I apply the paint in watercolor-thin layers. Sometimes a wash is cascaded down the entire face of the painting. Other times I introduce structure with flat housepainters’ brushes. And still other times I improvise gestural strokes or perform actions where resulting marks will be unexpected or unanticipated, such as purposely touching wet paintings against one another. The highly fluid nature of my process sets up challenging dynamics of control and release. I hope to coax a wide range of emotional results from these basic approaches.

Read Douglas Witmer’s CV here