“You have to evolve with time, or you dissolve with time.”

Dave Ortiz work is in many private collections. He is represented by Claire Oliver Gallery.

Dave is a New York artist of Puerto Rican descent whose work spans painting, silk-screen printmaking, drawing, and photography. Raised in East New York during the 1970s and '80s, Ortiz came of age in the graffiti zeitgeist an experience that would become the bedrock of a practice defined by vibrant color, cultural memory, and the collision of street and fine art. He later formalized his training at the Fine Arts School at FIT in New York City.

Ortiz is a colorist in the truest sense, channeling influences as varied as Matisse, Haring, De Kooning, Kandinsky into a visual language that moves fluidly between the abstract and the figurative and representational. His paintings and prints layer acrylic alongside spray paint and paint markers razor sharp line, These lines blur between gallery and street, while his printmaking practice developed in part through a residency at the Gowanus Print Lab, he has expanded his range into bold, graphic territory. Heritage and cultural assimilation are recurring themes throughout his body of work, with series like Jíbaro, the Goya Series, and United Deaths in America grounding personal and communal history in vibrant, spontaneous form.

His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions across New York, internationally in Berlin, Cannes, Mexico, and Miami, and he has participated in notable events including Robert Wilson's Watermill Summer Benefit, Naomi Campbell's Fashion for Relief in Cannes, and Scope Art Fair. Most recently, Ortiz was featured in We AmeRícans at Claire Oliver Gallery in Harlem, a landmark group exhibition celebrating Puerto Rican artists and their diasporic contributions. His work is held in numerous private collections. 

ARTIST STATEMENT

I paint what I see, or more precisely, everything I see at once. My work has grown into geometric landscapes built on perspective and abstraction I give the viewer a framework they can recognize, then I break it open. Like a barn. a tractor, a horse, Or even a rooster. After 51 years in New York City, I now live in rural upstate New York, and the subjects have changed completely but the approach hasn't. Color does my heavy lifting. It's not decoration, it's the feelings of color itself, the thing that tells me when something is working and when it isn't.

Growing up in East New York in the '80s, color wasn't something I studied, it was something I lived. Graffiti was at its absolute height, and where I lived was where they parked the trains at night. As kids we played in the layups, the very place they parked the trains, surrounded by some of the most ambitious color, lettering, words and name tags being made by teenagers and grown men alike. The work of artists like Futura 2000, Lee Quiñones, IZ THE WIZ, Seen, Quik and so many others, men who would go on to influence art and culture globally. That's where I first learned color theory, though nobody called it that.

That education never left me. Standing between those trains there was never enough room to see the whole piece, so you experienced it up close, fragmented, an explosion of color and geometric shapes with the energy of an atomic bomb. What I'm after now is that same feeling. When a viewer stands in front of my work I want them to see something familiar and something completely fractured at the same time, just like those giant trains in the dark.

PRESS