David Hirschi was born in Salt Lake City, Utah in 1952. In 1974, Hirschi moved to San Francisco after graduating from the University of Utah where he received a BA magna cum laude in creative writing and art history. He continued his education at the Academy of Art College, San Francisco, from 1982 to 1983.
He relocated to northern New Mexico in 1991. The following year he received the Juror's Award for his work in "Visions of Excellence" at the Fine Arts Gallery, Albuquerque, New Mexico. In 1999 he received a Change Inc. grant. While in New Mexico he exhibited at several local galleries and at the Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, where in 2001 he completed an installation of wall paintings with three other Santa Fe artists. From 1999 to 2006 he contributed works to "SITE Unseen," the biannual fundraiser for SITE Santa Fe. His work has also been shown in Arizona, California, Colorado and Texas.
In 2003 he was instrumental in the creation of a monthly program of artist lectures at the Santa Fe Art Institute, which he curated until 2005.
In the fall of 2006, Hirschi established his studio in Marfa, Texas, where he now lives.
In 1995 I drastically changed my way of painting. Dissatisfied with the results of narrative painting and abstraction, and painting derived from emotion, I reduced my painting to essentials — support and paint. The new paintings would not refer to an external; I would erase figure/ground relationship; I would not rely on inherited formal concerns. Color would be my subject. I began with three, small square paintings and by the end of two years had 14 paintings, each a different red. This was the beginning of my monochrome painting and the sense I had finally arrived at a vocabulary of my own. (It would be years later that I would discover I wasn't the only one, that there was a long history of monochrome painting.)
I can trace this desire for simplicity and reduction to work done earlier, in 1992. I moved into a cabin in Northern New Mexico without electricity or running water in a place called El Cañon. I lived there for two years and created a series of drawings of simple shapes — circles, arcs and bars — which became the Canyon Series.
I received little or no support for my first monochrome paintings and, in fact, was encouraged by colleagues to abandon one-color painting and return to abstraction as the one-color paintings would "lead nowhere." I am thankful I'm stubborn enough to rarely listen to others when it comes to my painting. When I first exhibited two of my monochromes, an angry, accusatory visitor remarked how dare I exhibit these; "they're about nothing!" Well, in fact, they are about nothing. They have no back story. Naively perhaps I believe this is obvious in the work itself, yet I sometimes feel compelled to explain myself.
I would like my paintings to be beautiful, in the sense that a mathematical equation is called beautiful. I continue to ask myself what is essential in the act of painting, and I continue to obtain satisfaction working within the long tradition of the monochrome.
