Placing himself on a continuum that includes Romanticism, the Hudson River School, and the metaphysical strands of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, David Mann pursues beauty and the sublime in his luminous, layered paintings. Ranging from small- to large-scale, and built up from numerous layers of opaque and translucent pigments, his compositions are inspired by the images of the cosmos produced by the Hubble telescope and by microscopic matter like viruses and cells. Oscillating between abstraction and representation, they are filled with explosive networks of cellular forms suspended in plasmic fields of color at moments of genesis, decay, or transformation. Through these forms Mann explores light, space, color, and illusionism—which he describes as “the center of the work, the tension, the motivation.”