David Hanes

David Hanes (b. 1987, Toronto, Canada) is a Canadian-American painter based between London and Berlin.

Hanes' practice begins outdoors with observational sketches made during his travels, recording fleeting impressions of light, colour, atmosphere, and place. Often carried for months or years before returning to the studio, these studies are transformed into luminous oil paintings that are less depictions than recollections. Shelters, forests, horizons, and skies recur throughout his work, not as fixed landscapes but as emotional terrains shaped by memory, distance, and time.

Working across intimate and monumental formats, Hanes explores painting as a way of inhabiting the world through sustained attention. His compositions balance abstraction and figuration, allowing colour, gesture, and rhythm to evoke states of contemplation, uncertainty, and renewal. Rather than documenting a specific location, his paintings seek to capture the emotional residue of experience, where grief and hope, solitude and wonder, coexist.

His work draws on the expressive traditions of early twentieth-century painting, from Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter to the Canadian Group of Seven, while engaging with a contemporary lineage of colour-driven painters including Edvard Munch, Georges Seurat, Daniel Richter, Andrew Cranston, and Sky Glabush. Hanes is currently completing an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, and has exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin, McBride Contemporain, Montreal, and on Platform by David Zwirner.