The works on view at White Cube Paris shift restlessly between registers: sculptures adopt the guise of furniture or ritual objects; textiles are animated by repoussé copper figures; drawings capture fleeting impulses in line and gesture. References to art history abound: the works bear visible traces of Giotto and the Renaissance masters to Duchamp and Medardo Rosso, offering a breadth of citation that resists assimilation into one canon. ‘The work is a foreign body’, David observes. ‘The less I recognise its contours, its substance, its intent, the more it speaks to me. I am drawn to the notion of the work as something that presents itself before me, like a traveller stepping off a bus from an unknown place […] At times I catch familiar traces, yet at best the encounter remains disarmingly surprising’.

It is within this uncertainty, where recognition falters and the familiar slips into estrangement, that David’s practice takes root. Several works on view underscore the recursive, accumulative nature of his practice by revisiting earlier forms in new materials and on new scales. The body emerges here as a central refrain – one provisional, mutable and, as the artist remarks, ‘in the process of being made’. More than a motif, the body functions as a problem-space in which David interrogates questions of identity, performativity and persona. Among them, Assumption of we (2014–25), cast in polymer plaster, evolves from David’s 2014 work The Assumption of Weee. The sculpture presents a figural mass in which multiple bodies rise from a shared base, their limbs and torsos pressed into one another while their heads remain individually articulated, as though arrested mid-movement. Read as facets of a single self, the figures suggest an identity dense with plurality, while the title refers to the shared condition that allows for a ‘we’. Its chalk-white surface and graphite-detailed faces gesture to the work’s origin in drawing – the medium from which many of the artist’s sculptures emerge.

The exhibition’s title likewise foregrounds the primacy of drawing in David’s practice, as well as the dilemma of making sculpture, of translation into material form. Here, the artist cites philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s imperative to ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world’, where drawing is not only a point of departure but also a provocation to sculpture, and the measure against which it must reckon. ‘Often the drawing tells me, I could become a sculpture, but then – what kind of sculpture do I become? What am I made of?’ Born into a family of makers whose skills spanned diverse domains of craft, David’s early intimacy with artisanal practice has profoundly influenced his approach, though the traditions of making are applied in unorthodox ways. Each medium proposes its own resolution, determining the terms by which a drawing acquires mass and presence in the world, whether in polymer plaster, bronze or other media. This enquiry extends into the exhibition’s series of woollen tapestries, a medium in which David has previously collaborated with his sister, an antique textile dealer and restorer. The tapestries exist between pictorial plane and sculptural relief, their woven surfaces animated by repoussé copper figures whose gestural contours sustain the linear impulse of drawing even as they press outwards into form. They are ‘like envoys from what has yet to arrive’, the artist suggests, ‘perhaps foreshadowing a future sculptural incarnation, or quietly delighting in the fragmented nature of their own creation.’

David’s commitment to figuration situates the body as an arena in which selfhood is continually rehearsed. The paired bronzes Self Portrait (2025) and You are her (2025), which grew out of earlier paintings, may be read as a self-portrait and its counter-portrait, or as two inflections of an unstable identity. Their formal treatments diverge: one accumulative, composed of small bronze ‘pebbles’; the other smoother, schematised into legible parts, its silhouette gesturing towards an enigmatic female presence. This insistence on figuration also permeates David’s furniture-form sculptures, in which domestic objects are unsettled by the intrusion of the body. In Sleepwalker (2025), a figure elongates into the stem of a lamp, its head encircling an onyx orb of light. In the aptly titled Intruder (2025), an oak dining table is upheld on one side by an appendage that fuses a wood planer – a tool employed in woodworking – with an inverted, bronze face, forced to bear the brunt of the furniture’s weight. In these works, a partial figure disrupts the seeming neutrality of design: what should serve as passive support becomes laden with psychic weight.

David acknowledges an inherent tension and fundamental precarity in the ways an inner drive manages to impress itself upon his work. At times, he observes, the spirit arrests the form with clarity while the material itself remains restless and uncertain; at others, the material submits and yet the resulting form is marred by doubt. It is within this interval that he situates the ‘quiet drama of making’ – the moment of accord when spirit finds its point of entry and material consents to be marked.

Enrico David (b. 1966) was born in Ancona, Italy, and moved to London in the late 1980s, where he continues to live and work. In 1994, he received a BA in Sculpture from Central Saint Martins, London.

Selected solo exhibitions include Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2025); TRAMPS, New York (2024); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2023); Gió Marconi, Milan, Italy (2022); Italian Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennale, Italy (2019); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2019); Casa Masaccio, San Giovanni Valdarno, Italy (2017); Sharjah Art Foundation, United Arab Emirates (2016); Lismore Castle, County Waterford, Ireland (2016); The Hepworth Wakefield, West Yorkshire, UK (2015); UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, California (2013); New Museum, New York (2012); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel, Switzerland (2009); Seattle Art Museum, Washington (2008); Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2007); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2007); and Tate Britain, London (2005), among others. Selected group exhibitions include Michael Werner Gallery, Athens (2024); Triennale di Milano, Italy (2023); The Church, Sag Harbor, New York (2022); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany (2022); Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy (2022); Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy (2020); Gladstone Gallery, New York (2020); Somerset House, London (2019); Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne, Germany (2019); De León Gallery, Bath, UK (2017); Massimo De Carlo, Milan, Italy (2016); Fondation Hippocrène, Paris (2014); and 55th Venice Biennale, Italy (2013).

His works have been held in numerous international public institutions, including MOCA, Los Angeles, California; Tate, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.