In Dog Years I'm Dead: David Flaugher

Bernheim, London is delighted to present David Flaugher’s solo exhibition, In Dog Years I’m Dead. In his second solo exhibition at Bernheim and first solo exhibition in London, the Detroit-based painter returns to the floral motif not as an occasion for lyricism but as a structural problem, a repeatable unit through which to measure the deterioration of clarity, the slow erosion of certainty in seeing. In Dog Years I'm Dead is an exhibition organized around recurrence, and what recurrence reveals: that nothing stays the same, even when everything looks identical.

 

 Opening Reception: Thursday, 04 June | 6–8 PM

 

Exhibition Dates: 04 June – 24 May, 2026

Location: Bernheim, 1 New Burlington St, London W1S 2JA

 

The conceptual pressure Flaugher applies to the still life tradition by removing its traditional weight transforms these paintings into something removed from their heritage. Without figures, without narrative props, without the symbolic freight that the vanitas genre spent centuries accumulating, the flower is left to operate as what the artist calls "a vehicle", a carrier for instability, for memory, for what he describes as "the emotional architecture of contemporary life." The phrase risks grandeur, but the paintings earn it through their systematic modesty. Each canvas is, as Flaugher puts it, "a variation of a system designed to archive this fragmenting with a clear and contemplative hand." The archive does not preserve; it registers change. The system does not resolve; it proliferates difference. This has been the most consistent theme in his oeuvre, from willow trees to tornadoes, the motif is only an excuse.

 

This show will be held concurrently at Bernheim, London, alongside Tsai Yin-Ju, Signs of Life.