NEW YORK, NY.- The New Museum presents the second exhibition in its recently inaugurated ‘Studio 231’ series. “Head Gas” is the first New York exhibition by Italian-born, Berlin-based artist Enrico David . Over the past twenty years, David has produced a body of work encompassing painting, drawing, sculpture, and collage that draws upon a rich variety of sources and expresses a range of complex emotional states. Although his work is highly celebrated throughout Europe the artist was among the nominees for the 2009 Turner Prize , for example—David’s work has rarely been exhibited in the United States. The figures populating David’s work convey the struggle of adaptation, both physical and psychological, of the self and of the image. In his art, we see haunting, incomplete, and sometimes grotesque characters fighting against and merging into backgrounds comprising a personal lexicon of forms. These patterns are derived from craft, folk art, and twentieth-century design, as well as advertising, techniques of display, fashion, and art historical moments.