Dan Colen: Poetry, 555 West 24th Street, New York, September 10–October 16, 2010

Installation Views

Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever. — Installation view, photo by Rob McKeever

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About

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

Gagosian is pleased to present Dan Colen’s first major solo exhibition in New York. This follows his two-part exhibition “I Live There”/“An Allegory of Faith” at Gagosian Gallery Davies Street in 2009 and the surreptitious exhibition “Potty Mouth Potty War” in the bathrooms of Gagosian Gallery West 24th Street in 2006.

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.

Artist

Dan Colen

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From the Quarterly

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Spring 2023

The Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.

Dan Colen: Other Worlds Are Possible

In this interview, curator and artist K.O. Nnamdie speaks with artist Dan Colen about his recent show in New York: Lover, Lover, Lover. Colen delves into the concept of “home” as it relates to his work, specifically the Mother and Woodworker series. Thinking through the political and historical implications of “homeland” in the context of the artist’s relationship with Israel and America, the two consider the intersections between these paintings—the final group of his Disney-inspired canvases—and Colen’s work with Sky High Farm, New York.

Sky High Farm Symposium at Judd Foundation: The Art Panel

In this video, Deana Haggag, program officer, Arts and Culture at Mellon Foundation; Dan Colen, artist and founder of Sky High Farm; Linda Goode Bryant, artist and founder of Project EATS; and Diya Vij, curator at Creative Time sit down together to explore the roles of artist and audience, place and accessibility, legacy, capital influence, and individual vs. collective agency as they relate to artmaking today.

Sky High Farm Symposium at Judd Foundation: The Community Panel

In this video, Thelma Golden, chief curator and director of the Studio Museum in Harlem; Tremaine Emory, founder of Denim Tears and creative director of Supreme; Father Mike Lopez, founder of the Hungry Monk Rescue Truck; and artist Anicka Yi sit down to explore how the concept of community has shaped their work, and the power in seeing the places we live, our histories, and even our bodies as porous, interdependent, and alive.

Sky High Farm Symposium at Judd Foundation: The Land Panel

In this video, Veronica Davidov, visual and environmental anthropologist; Karen Washington, activist, farmer and co-founder of Black Urban Growers (BUGS) and co-owner of Rise & Root Farm; Candice Hopkins, curator, writer and executive director of Forge Project; and Haley Mellin, artist, conservationist and founder of Art to Acres sit down to explore the tensions and overlaps between different efforts to define, use, and protect land.

Now available
Gagosian Quarterly Summer 2021

The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.

Dan Colen: Sky High Farm

In this video, Dan Colen speaks about his inspiration in founding Sky High Farm as a way to address food insecurity and improve access to fresh, nutritious food for underserved communities in New York. Established in 2011, the 40-acre farm raises pasture-based livestock and grows organic fruit and vegetables exclusively for donation.

The Bigger Picture
Sky High Farm × Project EATS

Dan Colen and Linda Goode Bryant are both artists who have founded nonprofits devoted to food justice. Here they speak about art, food, and life, including how they arrived at farming and the urgency of their projects’ missions during the current health crisis.

A Single Moment: Dan Colen and Francesco Bonami

Dan Colen joins Francesco Bonami in a conversation about absence and nostalgia, decadence and decay, progress and failure—and about help, the theme of his most recent body of paintings.

In Conversation
Dan Colen with Hans Ulrich Obrist

Against the backdrop of his survey exhibition Sweet Liberty, Dan Colen speaks about his work with Hans Ulrich Obrist, starting with his earliest interest in art and continuing up to the recent Desert paintings (2015–19).

Dan Colen: Carry On Cowboy

Gagosian Quarterly presents Dan Colen’s Carry On Cowboy. This performance first took place during the exhibition Dan Colen: High Noon at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Dan Colen: At Least They Died Together

Gagosian Quarterly presents Dan Colen’s At Least They Died Together. This performance first took place during the exhibition Dan Colen: High Noon at Gagosian, Beverly Hills.

Gagosian Quarterly Talks
Dan Colen, Dimitri Chamblas, and Douglas Fogle

Douglas Fogle moderates a conversation between Dan Colen and Dimitri Chamblas following the premiere of Colen’s two performance pieces At Least They Died Together and Carry On Cowboy.

Work in Progress
Dan Colen

We visit the artist’s studio in Brooklyn, New York, to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse of his new series of Desert paintings while he prepares for an upcoming exhibition in Beverly Hills. Text by Ben Eastham.

The Bigger Picture
Free Arts NYC

Meredith Mendelsohn discusses the impact of Free Arts NYC and its mission to foster creativity in children and teens, on the occasion of its twenty-year anniversary.

In Conversation
Dan Colen and Ali Subotnick

Dan Colen speaks with Ali Subotnick on the occasion of his exhibition Dan Colen: Sweet Liberty, at the Newport Street Gallery in London.

The Bigger Picture
RxART

Derek Blasberg speaks with Diane Brown, president and founder of RxART, and with contributing artists Dan Colen, Urs Fischer, and Jeff Koons about the transformative power of visual art.

Dan Colen: The Bowery School

In this video from the Louisiana Channel, Dan Colen sits down to talk about friends like Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow, and how his art developed to a place of celebration.