David Scanavino (b. 1978) is an American artist who lives and works in Providence. Working primarily in painting, he develops layered surfaces and compressed architectures of image and texture that test the boundaries between illusion, materiality, and abstraction. His works often move between systems and improvisation, using repetition, accumulation, and shifts of scale to build compositions that feel at once tactile and unstable. He received a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, 2001, and an MFA in Painting from the Yale University School of Art, New Haven, 2003. He is a faculty member at the Rhode Island School of Design and a founding faculty participant in its Florence program, Florence. Selected exhibitions include Repeater, Moody Center for the Arts, Houston, 2017; Imperial Texture, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, 2014; and Candy Crush, Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, St. Louis, 2014.
