David Hanes (b. 1987, Toronto) is a Canadian/American painter based between London and Berlin. His work begins outdoors with hand-held observational sketches made on site from his travels: imprints of light, colour, atmosphere, and energy. He carries these sometimes for years, filtering them through distance and time before transforming them in the studio into colour-driven oil paintings. Shelters, horizons, forests and skies — motifs he keeps returning to, not out of nostalgia, but out of concern. In this way, the paintings are not reproductions but recollections of marks, rhythms, moods, and the pause between then and now.
Through devoted looking and patient making, painting is how he inhabits time, sitting with the world long enough for something to declare itself. The ordinary becomes electric. The still begins to move. Working across intimate and large formats, his paintings are dwelling-places that hold a felt weight of being alive: grief and hope, loss and longing, suffering and curiosity. All existing together.
His work carries an awareness of early Expressionist groups such as Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter, the Group of Seven's relationship to the untamed landscape, and a lineage of colour-driven painters from Munch and Seurat through to contemporaries such as Daniel Richter, Andrew Cranston, and Sky Glabush.
Education
Current: MA Painting, Royal College of Art, London
2013 BFA Sculpture, OCAD University, Toronto
2011 Kansas City Art Institute, MO
Selected Solo Exhibitions
upcoming in 2027: PULPO GALLERY, Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany
2024 Mott Projects, Catskill, NY
2020 Spazio ORR, Brescia, IT
2018 Open Forum, Berlin
Selected Joint Exhibitions
2025 Zepster Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (Andrew Hildenbrand)
2025 McBride Contemporain, Montreal, CA (Alice Zeherini Le Reste)
2022 White Noise Gallery, Rome, IT (Richie Culver)
Selected Group Exhibitions
2026 Haricot Gallery, London
2026 MA Painting Postgraduate Show, Royal College of Art, London
2026 Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London
2024 Platform from David Zwirner Gallery, Online, NY
2023 Annika Nuttall Gallery, Aarhus, DK
2023 Il Bisonte Foundation, Florence, IT, curator: Silvia Belloti
2023 Andrea Festa Fine Art, Rome, IT
2021 Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, curator: Tobias Kappel
Residencies/Awards
2025 PM/AM Residency, London
2025 The Hopper Prize, Shortlist
2025 Nightworks, Berlin
2024 LungA School, Iceland
2023 "Luxembourg Art Week", Farmlands Residency, Luxembourg
2023 Mobility Scholarship, Embassy of Canada in Rome, Italy
2023 Villa Lena Foundation, Italy
2023 Emerge Project Space, Italy
2019 Penthouse Artist Residency, Brussels.