Electronic art pioneer David Em’s work encompasses virtual worlds, film, photography, sculpture, and printmaking. His work has connections to mysticism, surrealism and abstract painting. He says he “sculpts with memory instead of space,” makes pictures with “light instead of paint,” and “evolves images that grow into and out of each other.”
He was born in Los Angeles in 1952 and grew up in Colombia, Venezuela, and Argentina. He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia, interdisciplinary art at Goddard College, and film directing at the American Film Institute in Hollywood.
Em began producing digital art in the 1970s, before the advent of personal computers. He worked as an independent artist in research laboratories, including the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology Group. In 1994, he set up his own electronic art studio in Los Angeles.
David Em’s art has been featured in many publications, including Smithsonian, Newsweek, Der Spiegel, and the textbook Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. A monograph of his early work titled The Art of David Em has been published by Harry N. Abrams. His work has been exhibited in museums in the US, Europe, and Japan, including Centre Pompidou, the Seibu Museum in Tokyo, and the Spanish Museum of Contemporary Art. He has had over a dozen solo shows and has lectured at many institutions, including Harvard, MIT, Caltech, the University of Paris, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.
Em lives in Sierra Madre, California with his wife Michele and son Griffin. To read about the development of his art, click here.