Douglas Witmer (American, born in Winchester, Virginia, in 1971) is an internationally exhibiting artist based in Philadelphia. Witmer completed his BA at Goshen College in Indiana and subsequently graduated with an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2001.

For over two decades, Douglas Witmer has steadily pursued a personal inquiry into the materiality of the painted object, refining his processes within the framework of reductive abstract painting. His elemental compositional structures are activated by sensuous colours and various improvised gestural and incidental actions. His ongoing interest is establishing a visual place that offers someone an open invitation for a personal experience of seeing and feeling.

Compelled by issues of perception in terms of the viewer’s relationship to and connection with art, Douglas Witmer thrives on the very experience of art. Emphasizing elements such as materiality and commodification, Witmer raises essential issues in his dynamic body of work that can launch valuable conversations with his audience. By doing so, Witmer enlivens his work and turns it into a conversation piece for the contemporary generation.

Witmer has said: “In the 21st century, I see my work as offering a clear alternative in a visual culture dominated by speed, layering, and complexity. I do not believe my work requires any prerequisite knowledge beyond what you bring to it. My hope is that it can activate the sense that you simply feel yourself seeing. I like to think of that kind of moment as clear, pure, innocent, and solitary. And if you can get to it, then you have, in a way, started an experiential engine for yourself, and your thoughts can begin to move in uniquely personal directions.”

This speaks to a sense of the artist’s personal history having been raised in the Mennonite culture of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania with deep connections to simplicity, peace-making, and humility.

Witmer’s work has been the subject of numerous exhibitions. In 2011 an exhibition spanning ten years of the artist’s work was mounted at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College in Winter Park, FL. Other venues include: MoMA PS1, The Curator Gallery, and The Painting Center (all NYC), The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Philadelphia), The Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Gray Contemporary (Houston), Gebert Contemporary (Santa Fe), The University of Maryland, The University of Dayton, Galerie Mathias Mayr (Austria), ParisCONCRET (France), Sydney Non-Objective (Australia), Sol del Rio Arte Contemporanea (Guatemala City) and Galerie Biesenbach in Cologne. His work is held in the collections of The Woodmere Art Museum, The Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska, and The Fellowship of The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as numerous corporate and private collections internationally.

Douglas Witmer’s work has been documented in publications by The Woodmere Museum of Art, The Free Library of Philadelphia, and his exhibitions have been reviewed in The Washington Post, Two Coats of Paint, and Art New England, and other arts periodicals and websites.

Selected Solo and Group Exhibitions