David Spriggs

David Spriggs creates sculptural installations that exist between image and object, transforming layered transparency into spatial form. Using a technique he pioneered in 1999, he builds hand-worked images into display structures to produce volumetric works that appear to hover, dissolve and shift as the viewer moves.

Explosions, storms, waves and figures become suspended fields of colour and light through which Spriggs explores movement, space-time, perception, surveillance and the visual language of power. His work challenges the boundary between two and three dimensions, asking viewers to experience the image physically rather than encounter it from a fixed position.

He received his BFA from Emily Carr University in Vancouver and his MFA from Concordia University in Montreal, complemented by student residencies at Central Saint Martins in London and the Bauhaus University in Weimar. He is currently based on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

Spriggs has exhibited internationally at the Brooklyn Museum, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, the Sharjah Biennale, Noor Riyadh, Kunsthal Rotterdam, the ArtScience Museum Singapore, the Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, the Oku-Noto Triennale, Chroniques Biennale Marseille, Musée de La Poste Paris, Powerlong Museum Shanghai, Times Art Museum Beijing and Chengdu, the 5th International Digital Art Biennial Montreal, Prague Biennial 5 and the Louis Vuitton Gallery Macau.

His work is held in the collections of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec and the Museo Materiali Minimi d’Arte Contemporanea in Paestum, with permanent installations at Simcoe Place Toronto, Resorts World Las Vegas, Hyatt Centric Victoria Harbour Hong Kong, Queen’s Marque Halifax and the Docking State Office Building in Topeka. His artwork Red Gravity became the cover art for Peter Gabriel’s song Panopticom. He is also a recipient of the Académie des Beaux-Arts / Fondation Jacques Rougerie Prix for Art, awarded in Paris in 2024.

David Spriggs constructs sculptural images by layering hundreds of transparent surfaces into precisely aligned three-dimensional compositions. As viewers move through space, these suspended layers continually separate and recombine, transforming static images into volumetric forms that appear to hover between material object and optical illusion.

Working across themes including movement, colour, surveillance, power and the invisible forces that shape contemporary society, Spriggs uses perception itself as an artistic material. His installations cannot be understood from a single viewpoint; instead, they unfold through movement, requiring audiences to physically navigate around each work as images dissolve, reform and shift within space. The result is a practice that challenges conventional distinctions between painting, sculpture and architecture while expanding our understanding of what an image can become.