Dan Colen Exhibition Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street, New York

DAN COLEN, POETRY
Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street, New York
September 10 - October 16, 2010

Dan Colen’s first major solo exhibition in New York will be on view at Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street. This follows his two-part exhibition “I Live There”/“An Allegory of Faith” at Gagosian Gallery Davies Street (London) in 2008-2009 and the surreptitious exhibition “Potty Mouth Potty War” in the bathrooms of Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street in 2006 (March 11 - April 15, 2006).

This show has a lot to do with failure and potential, accident and intention, and time at its most minute and most infinite. It’s about how powerful a single simple gesture can be.
--Dan Colen

Drawing from mass media, local environment, and subculture, Colen’s art imbues the ordinary, the disenfranchised, and the tribal with provocative new status. Working from personal experience with subjects overlooked or considered rogue and delinquent by art and society, he explores the very essence of dichotomy through risk and affect, juggling immediacy of expression with technical perfection. Slipperiness of meaning results in his painstaking reconstruction of ‘what might have been’; in paintings whose apparent incidental qualities – from showered confetti and heavily accreted bird droppings to scrawled song lyrics, random thoughts, and absurd slogans -- are, in fact, the result of expert and painstaking brush technique over equally obsessively crafted surfaces; in sculptures that feign the inadvertent monuments and sites on which popular culture inscribes its voices and traces; and in the inverse play of editing, subcontracting, stealing, and transposing.

In this exhibition, Colen adds a further layer of complexity to his meditations on the mimetic nature of art by moving even closer to the reality from which he has always drawn inspiration. Real life, with its social habits and strong aesthetic preferences, seems to be so perfectly and potently designed that the only possible role open to him is as choreographer of single, bold, and exquisite acts of transformation. The scale of his new works and the spaces that house them befit this more resolute embrace of reality and its uncertainties.

In his fervent yet exacting approach to making and staging art, Colen continues to cultivate the marriage of spectacle and pure chance in relation to the materiality of the readymade and Minimalist object. His self-conscious stance, which combines vivid lived experience with aesthetic purposefulness arising from an equally vivid perspective on the freight of art history, allows viewers to share in unexpected moments of transcendence. With “Poetry,” Colen widens and deepens the space in which to reflect on immanence, faith, and doubt in the world today.

DAN COLEN was born in New Jersey in 1979. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2001. Exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “USA Today,” The Royal Academy, London; “Defamation of Character,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York; and “Fantastic Politics,” The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo. Colen lives and works in New York City.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY
555 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011

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Dan Colen at Gagosian Gallery London - I live there… and An allegory of faith… exhibitions

DAN COLEN
Gagosian Gallery Davies Street, London
I live there…, 27 November - 17 December 2008

An allegory of faith…, 18 December - 7 February 2009

Gagosian Gallery presents Dan Colen's first solo exhibition in London.

The exhibition comprises three components of equal importance: The first is a group of cartoon drawings by a hired illustrator who refers to the notebooks that Colen has filled with art that he has made and wants to make, as well as declarations, common thought, and uncommon fantasy. The second is a large and detailed oil painting entitled An allegory of faith..., which depicts the bench in the woods where Walt Disney's Cinderella first meets her Fairy Godmother. The third is a printed booklet of snapshots taken by Colen in Central Park over the course of an afternoon, evening and night, that visitors to the exhibition can take away. The three exhibition components are connected by the otherworldly dark forest and a marked lack of human presence, which is underscored by the vitrine-like quality of the Davies Street storefront gallery.

Seen through the glass window, Colen's painting reflects on the still ardently debated issues raised by Modernist art critic and historian Michael Fried in his seminal studies, "Art and Objecthood" (1967) and Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, 1980 – the threat posed to aesthetic experience by the "theatrical" materiality of the Minimalist object and, conversely, the theatricality produced by "a consciousness of viewing" at the expense of total aesthetic absorption. Colen's bench-painting, which maps a selective trompe l'oeil rendering of a received cartoon image onto the formalism of John McCracken's lacquered plank, limns the space between sculpture, painting, and pure illusion. In Colen's incarnation of Disney's animation, Cinderella has been removed (thus leaving space for the viewer's projection) leaving just the trail of magic dust that appears when the Fairy Godmother moves, metaphysically, in and out of space.

GAGOSIAN GALLERY 17-19 Davies Street
London W1K 3DE