Featured image: Seeker, David Luber, 2025, mixed media, 12 x 24 x 14 in. / 30.48 x 60.96 x 35.56 cm.
David Luber’s newest body of work unfolds like a contemporary scripture, one written in oil, clay, steel, and shadow.
David Luber creates mythic, emotionally charged works exploring transformation, spirituality, and the sacred feminine through painting and sculpture.
Across painting and sculpture, he investigates the sacred feminine, the architecture of suffering, and the slow metamorphosis of the soul. She Who Cries Gold, Liberation, and She Who Becomes the Sky each present a different threshold moment, when grief becomes revelation, when identity fractures into freedom, and when spirit rises to meet its own mythology.
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She Who Cries Gold, David Luber, 2025, oil on two canvas diptych, 72 x 36 in. / 182.88 x 91.44 cm.
In She Who Cries Gold, Luber renders a figure caught between collapse and ascension. Her wings, expansive and ghost-pale, echo a memory of divinity she can no longer inhabit fully. The cool blues and muted gradients intensify the emotional weight, while the diptych format introduces a literal fracture in the composition. This break mirrors the internal rupture the subject endures: the moment when faith fails, but the sacred emerges from within the wound rather than above it. Luber elevates suffering into a luminous rite of passage.
Liberation, David Luber, 2024, mixed media, 14 x 9 x 5 in. / 35.56 x 22.86 x 12.7 cm.
Liberation shifts from painting to sculpture but continues the theme of metamorphosis. A slender, faceless figure made of ceramic and steel stands alongside a vibrant, wing-like form unfurling in blues and greens. The juxtaposition reveals a psychic tension, between the stripped-down self and the possibility of flight. The cracked surfaces, stitched together by dark lines, evoke kintsugi, the Japanese practice of honoring repair. The wooden base grounds the piece in the natural world while the upward tilt of the wing suggests spiritual escape. Luber positions transformation not as something clean or triumphant, but as a jagged, ongoing negotiation between what we shed and what we claim.
She Who Becomes the Sky, David Luber, 2025, oil on canvas, 36 x 36 in. / 91.44 x 91.44 cm.
In She Who Becomes the Sky, the sacred feminine dissolves into mythic form. The bison, glowing in atmospheric blues and violets, becomes the vessel of her rising power. Its horns stand as split manifestations of her essence, lifting like crescents toward the darkened sky. The work feels ceremonial, almost ancestral, invoking themes of memory, land, and spiritual inheritance. The animal’s gaze is steady, almost mournful, grounding the otherwise cosmic palette. Luber merges human and creature into a single, transcendent entity, a reminder that creation and destruction, earth and heaven, feminine and feral, are never truly separate.
Together, these works chart a journey from fracture to elevation. Luber explores transformation not as a heroic arc but as an infinite cycle, pain turning to light, identity breaking open, the divine revealing itself through the body, the earth, and the unseen. Across mediums, he constructs a mythic language where suffering is not an ending but a catalyst, and where the sacred finds form in both flesh and shadow.
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Listen to the Old Ones, David Luber, 2024, oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in. / 121.92 x 91.44 cm.
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