David Row is a contemporary abstract painter and master printmaker, associated with the Postmodern Painting and Conceptual Abstraction movements. Row was born in 1949 in Portland, ME, and grew up outside New Haven, CT. He studied art at Yale University from 1968 to 1974, receiving his BFA from Yale in 1972. He then spent a year studying Indian music in Calcutta and in 1974 returned to the US to complete his MFA. During his time in Yale, Row met fellow painter Al Held, who would become a lifelong friend and mentor. After finishing his studies, he moved to New York City where he became a renowned member of a new young generation of abstract painters including Ross Bleckner, Peter Halley, and Mary Heilmann.

Row is well known for his unique approach to geometric abstraction: ellipses and exes (which have become a motif throughout his work) are cropped and flipped into complex compositions which serve as points or constellations from which Rows starts to interconnect with shapes and bright, delicate lines of color, transforming the two-dimensional painted composition into a dynamic, multi-perspectival space. More recently, his shaped polygonal canvases have become an identifying element of his art.

Row was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987) and the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, in New York, in May 2008. His works are in the permanent collections of museums worldwide including The Brooklyn Museum, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego among others.

Row lives and works in New York City and currently teaches painting at the School of Visual Arts in New York. He has been honored as Scholar of the House in Painting at Yale (1971-1972) and with a National Endowment for the Arts Grant in Painting (1987). He received the Isaac N. Maynard Prize for Painting from the National Academy Museum, New York, in May 2008.