Damian Loeb

Damian Loeb

Hyper-realist paintings on urban themes by the New York painter.

Damian Loeb (born May 9, 1970 in New Haven, Connecticut) is an American painter. Self-taught, he moved to New York City in the early 1990s.

Discovered by Jeffrey Deitch, Loeb had his first solo in 1999. Since then, he has had international solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, White Cube in London, the Jablonka Galerie in Cologne, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, and a 2006 retrospective of his work at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Connecticut. His work is featured in several prestigious private collections, including Douglas Cramer, Michael Lynne, and the Rubell Family Collection, and has attracted the attention of a number of collectors. He is currently represented by the Acquavella Gallery.


Loeb's early works were based on collages culled from varied sources, including advertisements, magazines, television, and books. The resulting paintings depict unsettling scenes rendered in a highly representational, seamlessly multi-layered composition. The atmosphere in the finished works expresses a dreamlike and surreal state, as if painted from an emotional memory. They allude to the work of Waterhouse or Wyeth, with surreal components plucked from postmodern culture.

Much of this early work gained him notoriety for his appropriation of images from contemporary media sources, and his paintings were the subject of several lawsuits brought by photographers over issues of copyright infringement. In 2004, controversy led to the removal of one of his paintings, Blow Job (The Three Little Boys) from a show at the University of Hartford.


After the appropriation series, Loeb embarked on a series of paintings based on stills from classic Horror and Science Fiction films. To create these works, he captured and digitally combined multiple stills which were then rendered as large oil paintings. Many of the works take the form of extreme landscapes up to 14 feet long, engulfing one's field of view and reproducing the atmospheric elements of the scene without the use of recognizable or iconic signifiers.

In September of 2008 Loeb showed two new series of work at the Acquavella Galleries in New York. These included several large paintings which bore a striking resemblance to film stills, but were all based on the artist's own personal photographs. The tightly rendered paintings evoked the iconic narrative images embedded in the collective unconscious, illustrating the overlap between our memories of images from contemporary cinema and our ‘real world’ experiences.

In the second series of paintings, Loeb delved into the dark psychology of memory and emotion. These more loosely rendered pieces addressed psychological themes such as perception, distortion, fear, and fantasy in the form of small landscapes.

The addition of these works to Loeb's oeuvre has lead critics to describe him as a 21st century Turner.


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