David Rathman

After making a splash at galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and Berlin, Minneapolis-based artist David Rathman is returning to the Twin Cities for a show of new work at the Weinstein Gallery, his first local exposure since an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in 2003. Raised in Montana and schooled at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Rathman’s early art was clearly influenced by punk rock, but he made his first big mark with a body of work inspired by the Westerns of such punk progenitors as Sam Peckinpah. Those drawings, paintings, and prints featured stark silhouettes of cowboys, and usually incorporated snippets of text functioning equally as Zen koan and punchline. The western stuff was utterly distinctive, and clearly touched a nerve with collectors, not to mention art directors; Rathman’s work has been featured in such publications as Harper’s and the New York Times’ Style section. In recent years he’s moved on to other subject matter—boxers, wrestlers, stock car crashes—and the works on display at the Weinstein are devoted to high school football. Regardless of his topic, however, Rathman’s dark, atmospheric style and off-kilter sensibility remain unmistakably his own.

So where did this new obsession with football come from?
I loved football when I was a boy. I wanted to play in high school but I was small. I sort of lost interest for a while. And then kind of a beautiful thing happened a few years ago—I got hooked up with a kid through the Big Brothers mentoring program and one of the first things he wanted to do was play football. That renewed my interest in the game, to see the boys playing for the sport of it.
Later, my father mentioned he’d been to a six-man football game. So I went to Montana and watched some of these games. And it was just beautiful. There was an amazing atmosphere in these mining towns. These hills were ringing the field, and that was really seductive to me. And the way the games were played was really interesting. They play on a lined field but everything’s scaled way down. I had this marvelous Saturday going to two games, and the bulk of this show was inspired by that trip.

How did you know you were onto something?
Sometimes you chase things and they just don’t click. But I think the football thing—it’s sort of theatrical, something dramatic is always happening. The other thing was the bodies of these high school football players: a lot of them are very manly, and standing next to them would be some skinny, knock-kneed kid. I’ve also always loved the gear—the padding, the helmets, the gloves—and that struck me as something that’d be interesting to paint.

You’re probably best known for the cowboy work. How long did you stick with that? And what caused you to move away from it?
I’d say it was about three years. It started out with two shows in New York and one in Berlin and then I did one at the Walker—those were all drawings on paper. That was an amazing thing when I found that material; I knew I had something there. I scoured film books, watched Westerns, took Polaroids of the screens. But there came a time when I just wanted to stop, but I’ve also felt that I’d like to go back to it.

There is a preponderance of masculine themes in your work.
What is the deal there, right? People ask me that all the time. I’ve never come up with a good answer. I just like this stuff. As a child I was very small, very inward and dreamy; I think some of that’s still going on. I remember being really thrilled by those Western characters. It was also a big deal as a boy growing up in a small town to watch high school football. Obviously, there are things I’m dealing with there; there’s aggression; it’s people being tested, contesting. It almost feels like I’m making pictures of the things that captivated me when I was a boy. I wanted to be an artist from day one, and so I kind of gravitated, over time, to the stuff I was into when I was eight years old: cars crashing, football players, boxing …

Who are some of your influences in terms of other artists?
I love Goya—especially his dark paintings, the way he pulls figures out of the darkness, that heavy atmosphere and mood. Rembrandt as well, especially his print work. Love Philip Guston. Oh, and Basquiat. I absolutely love that guy.

Home and Away, an exhibit of new work by David Rathman, runs through March 10 at the Weinstein Gallery, 908 W. 46th St., Minneapolis; 612-822-1722;
www.weinstein-gallery.com