David Mann (b. 1961) is an American contemporary painter known for his luminous, atmospheric abstractions that draw inspiration from celestial phenomena, cosmic space, and the sublime scale of the natural world. Working from his studio in Los Angeles, Mann has developed a distinctive personal practice that combines painterly refinement with an unusual sense of imaginative expansiveness, producing pictures that seem to open outward into deep, contemplative space.

Mann's paintings characteristically feature softly glowing forms, atmospheric fields of layered color, and biomorphic passages that suggest planets, nebulae, cellular structures, or the sensory experience of light moving through water. His compositions balance abstract structural clarity with a real sense of poetic mystery, and his work rewards the kind of slow, sustained looking that allows the small events across each canvas to become fully visible. His refined use of glazes and layered paint gives his surfaces an unusual translucency and depth, and the light in his paintings feels as though it emerges from within the picture rather than falling across it.

Mann has exhibited widely in the United States and internationally, and he is represented by Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Los Angeles and other significant galleries. His paintings have entered notable public and private collections, and he has attracted a devoted audience among contemporary collectors interested in the meeting of painterly craft with the broader visual traditions of visionary and cosmic art.

Working within the vibrant Los Angeles contemporary art community, Mann belongs to a tradition of West Coast painters, including figures such as James Turrell and members of the earlier Light and Space movement, who have made the phenomenology of light and perception their central subject. Yet Mann's practice remains distinctly his own, rooted in the intimate scale of the painted surface and in a personal engagement with the deeper wonders of the observed and imagined universe.