DAVID ROHN
CROWDED CONDITIONS
Exhibition text by Ross Karlan
August 28 - October 1, 2026
David Rohn’s work is grounded in two things: transformation, in several senses of the word, and Miami as both the context and the content of his vision. David Rohn: Crowded Condition pushes both further, especially in his newest suite of paintings.
Transformation has been at the core of Rohn’s practice for the last two decades, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. His (self)-Portraiture series depends on his ability to become other characters and personalities, each a commentary on identity in contemporary society. Street Peeps extends that process: the same self-transformation, now into the likeness of homeless people he encountered in Miami.
The work is oddly playful — Rohn remains recognizable to anyone who knows him — and deeply humanizing. The life-size photographs, pasted onto public buildings, treat the people he embodies with a kind of dignity, briefly occupying the city’s surfaces so that passersby may or may not notice the intervention in a landscape that never stops changing.
That changing landscape is another kind of transformation in the work, and it strikes a different note. Miami’s constant development — its gentrification and remaking — has intensified the homelessness that Rohn keeps returning to. Without that pressure, Street Peeps would barely be possible. The city’s crisis is, uncomfortably, both the condition and the subject of the work.
It has also changed Rohn’s hand as a painter. In the new paintings he steps back from photography and overt self-representation to say something broader about the present. The pictures are crowded with images and histories: narratives, motifs, and visual layers that overlap rather than resolve.
His eye for art history is easy to see — glances toward Basquiat, Manet, Chagall, and others — and the geometric grids that structure many of the backgrounds hold the pictures between chaos and balance, abstraction and figuration. At the same time, the saturated color and a certain looseness pull the work away from those masters. What comes through instead is innocence, whimsy, and an earnest testing of a medium that has been dominated for centuries.
Rohn is also known for his work at Camillus House, which provides shelter and support services in Miami-Dade. For six years he has taught art there and mentored students. It is hard to look at the new paintings and not feel that influence: a last turn in the artist’s own transformation, the teacher becoming the student. Those relationships are part of his current practice.
In his own words: “As I have learned to qualify my praise of their work by quantifying it alongside the highest quality of work I've seen each one of them produce, I've pushed them to strive to do their best, and not to settle for less than what they have already proven themselves capable of; and now have wound up holding myself, in my work, to a similar standard.” Yet here, it is Miami’s most marginalized who become the teachers, bringing their own visual curiosity, sense of human connection, and artistic rigor into dialogue with Rohn’s latest painting endeavor, the embodiment of an artist who, like the city around him, is always changing.
Dr. Ross Karlan, Independent Curator
About David Rohn
David Rohn is a Miami-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, photography, installation, performance, and found-object sculpture. He studied art and urbanism at Colgate University and New York University before pursuing architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.
Rohn began painting in New York in the early 1980s and continued his practice in Paris, where he exhibited at Galerie Julien Pellat and participated in exhibitions including the Salon de Montrouge and La Masse des Beaux Arts. He moved to Miami in 1992, where his practice expanded to include writing, socially reflective and interactive installations, and performative projects.
Since 2008, Rohn’s (self)-Portraiture series has developed into an evolving investigation of identity, representation, consumer culture, and the relationship between the individual and contemporary society. More recent works incorporate cast-off and found objects, photography, and painting, reflecting on throw-away culture and consumerism.
Rohn’s longstanding engagement with art history has also informed bodies of work inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Catholic saints and Contemporary images derived from old Testament stories, populated by the indigent street dwellers characteristic of local Miami and other contemporary settings.
His work has been exhibited and reviewed extensively throughout South Florida, as well as in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and Berlin. He also continues to develop collaborative and performative projects with Danilo de la Torre and other collaborators through LaboMamo Collab, alongside his unofficial public art projects based on his self-portraiture.