My name is Dr. David Strauss. I am a painter, economist, and thinker.
I studied economics and philosophy in Tübingen and completed a PhD in economics at the European University Institute in Florence — one of Europe’s leading research institutions. From 2014 to 2018 I was a professor and researcher at the renowned CIDE university in Mexico City. In 2019 I left academic life — not research in general. Academia today is too career-oriented for my taste, too narrowly specialised, too far removed from the philosophical and economic questions that genuinely occupy me.
My current research moves at the intersection of economics and philosophy. How deeply do worldviews shape the dominant allocation mechanisms of a society? Why is the free market becoming increasingly incapable of solving the modern problems of environmental crisis and inequality? Why do modern forms of the division of labour — with highly specialised, profit-oriented professions — undermine the efficiency of markets and their capacity to address contemporary social problems? Why does the combination of free markets and democracy prove incapable of mounting a serious response to the environmental crisis?
In 2019 I bought an old truck and converted it into my mobile home and studio. Since 2020 I have spent most of each year in remote places in nature — in deserted mountain valleys or on empty beaches. I write, paint, observe animals. I live the way I think and paint: without excess. Not for personal hedonistic reasons, but because a sustainable life is a precondition for other living beings to exercise their own right to life. Even if the modern system permits — and even encourages — unsustainable behaviour, that does not make it right or good.
As a painter I am self-taught — no academy, no teacher. I work with the glazing technique: layer upon layer of transparent oil paint, building depth and luminosity that direct application cannot achieve. I have been painting figurative oil paintings since 2019, across several series. The earlier works — series from 2019 to 2023 — contain interesting motifs and some large-format paintings, but technically they fall clearly short of my most recent work. The series Human Emotions and A World in Trouble, made in 2024 and 2025, are the result of that development: figurative painting that places human faces and animals inside a destroyed or threatened world.
We are nothing but life.