Last Dream

David Hendren
October 18 - November 30, 2025

Last Dream is a reference to early morning hours, where the transition to wakefulness is most blurred. I’m not really into dream interpretation, but they’re a part of life and truly our own, which makes the experiences unique. It’s rare that the paintings come from actual dreams. Rather, it’s the head space that I want to claim before the day sets in, pulls you into your body. I don’t know if it’s the fresh mind or the dream-adjacent space (probably both), but I find this time conducive to image-making. The Drawing Table is a key to the show, and an outlier in its graphic depiction. Most mornings I draw and write in notebooks and small pieces of paper. These sources inform the glassworks, in both composition and feel. Some of the works depict bodies, loosely merging with their surroundings. Others are abstract, drifting arrangements that align with the morning head space, a slow-motion quality. Many of the works convey the time of day and feel like atmospheric clocks.

I’ve written before about the glass work, how it’s essentially a collage that fuses in the kiln. There’s a paradoxical feel to the medium, at least as a painting, that I find compelling. The compositions are made with pieces of glass, cut sheets and bent rods. I like the sculptural nature of this phase, tactile and free. After the work is fired, however, all of that looseness is erased. It melts into a single pane of glass, retaining all the decisions and history of its inception, but without a trace of the hand. Here lies the uncanny nature of the work. A glass painting. Those words paired are confusing on their own, and that strangeness carries into this body of work more generally.

David Hendren is an artist, living and working in Los Angeles and Landers, CA. He got his start showing sculpture, but has recently added kiln-formed glass paintings to his practice. He’s shown his work widely in Los Angeles, including at Alto Beta, Lowell Ryan Gallery, Emma Gray HQ, Anat Ebgi, and Kim Light/Lightbox. He recently showed The Recording Studio, a sculptural installation at Goat Gallery in Landers. He’s the recipient of the Pollock-Krasner grant, the Lincoln City Fellowship, and the Toby Devon Lewis Fellowship. Hendren will show a new body of glass paintings at Left Field Gallery in Los Osos, CA, in October.