Colangelo to show two decades of work at Bruno David Gallery

Dean Carmon Colangelo, an accomplished printmaker, will show an exhibition of work spanning the last 20 years at Bruno David Gallery in St. Louis. The exhibition — called “Carmon Colangelo: 20-Year Survey” — coincides with the conclusion of his tenure as dean of the Sam Fox School at WashU, a role he has held since the school’s founding in 2006.

The exhibition traces the evolution of Colangelo’s distinctive visual language, one grounded in layering, experimentation, and sustained inquiry into the systems that shape perception and contemporary life. His practice moves between printmaking and painting, drawing on cartography, environmental imagery, anatomical diagrams, and abstraction.

An early adopter of technology since his first Mac Plus computer in 1985, Colangelo also engages AI models in some works, exploring the relationship between human and machine intelligence and ultimately reaffirming his commitment to the handmade. The resulting works unfold gradually, revealing layered networks of reference and meaning.

The gallery shared that recurring themes emerge across the 20-year arc, including “environmental fragility, the permeability of borders, the collapse and reconstruction of meaning, and the human impulse to map the unknown. Landscapes merge with data. Atmospheric fields intersect with diagrammatic marks. What initially appears chaotic resolves into carefully calibrated compositions that balance chance and control.”

Colangelo’s work has been featured in 30 solo exhibitions and more than 100 group exhibitions worldwide. In 2023, he created prints on canvas for 173 guest rooms at St. Louis’s 21c Museum Hotel. His works are held in the collections of the National Museum of American Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, among others.

The exhibition opens with a reception Friday, April 24, 6-8 p.m. at Bruno David Gallery. The work will be on view through June 27.