Dave Clay’s Otherworldly Industry

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Image courtesy of Grohmann Museum

Blast Furnace (2025) by Dave Clay

Blast Furnace (2025) by Dave Clay

Dave Clay paints in many shades of gunmetal gray, steaked with the dull orange of factory fire. The results are realistic yet impressionistic scenes of factory interiors, foundries, forges and rolling mills. The geometry of the vast machinery wavers in the dark light playing with the eye of the beholder.

His exhibit at the Grohmann Museum has a prosaic but accurate title, “Dave Clay’s Industrial Atmospheres.” The artist captures an unsettling sense of darkness and alienation.

“I ran across Dave Clay in talking with WMSE’s station manager Tom Crawford,” says the Grohmann’s director, James Kieselburg. “Tom said his industrial paintings were mind blowing, and when I saw them, I said, ‘Wow, he’s really onto something!’ He’s postmodern and futuristic—like he came out of the pages of a science-fiction magazine.”

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Image courtesy of Grohmann Museum

Forge Hammer (2024) by Dave Clay

Forge Hammer (2024) by Dave Clay

Clay is a Milwaukee expat who moved to Seattle years ago to pursue a career as a software architect. He has worked in other media, including a motion-activated video installation for the Burning Man festival. For his Grohmann show, he focused on paintings, oil on board or occasionally canvas. The oldest work in “Industrial Atmospheres” dates from 2020. Most were created in 2025 specially for the show.

According to Kieselburg, Clay was inspired by Viktor Macha, the acclaimed Czech industrial photographer who has imaginatively documented factory scenes across much of Europe. (Kieselburg hopes to mount a Macha exhibition in the future). Unlike Macha’s photographs, Clay’s paintings are devoid of humanity. He depicts “just the machinery and the apparatus of industry,” Kieselburg says. “They lend themselves to an otherworldly look.”

One of Clay’s new paintings, Arc Furnace III, ventures into the third dimension by incorporating found industrial objects. The remaining works in “Atmospheres” relay on paint alone, their color and texture executed with great command of brush strokes. The machinery he depicts is massive, formidable, gray and dirty but lit with the alchemical fire that transforms raw material into objects of consumption. That no human hands are visible might be a vision of industry’s fully automated, post-worker future.

“Dave Clay’s Industrial Atmospheres” opens Friday, Jan. 16 with a 5-9 p.m. reception and an artist’s talk at 7 p.m. “Industrial Atmospheres” runs through April 26 at the Grohmann Museum,