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.
Gagosian is pleased to present High Noon, an exhibition of Desert paintings by Dan Colen.
Colen’s early works were hyperrealistic paintings of lived-in interiors—a cluttered bathroom, a messy bedroom, a camping tent—that included supernatural or religious figures, including Jesus Christ, the ghost of his grandfather, and flying cartoon cherubim. Frustrated by what he perceived as a limited discourse surrounding photorealism, Colen shifted his focus to making paintings using unconventional media—chewing gum, trash, tar and feathers, soil, and metal studs—as well as papier-mâché works, animatronic sculptures, lifelike nude self-portraits, and uncanny installations incorporating flags, sneakers, and handmade replicas of beer bottles and cigarette butts.
Over the last four years, Colen has returned to representational oil painting through more formalist investigations into the “materiality of color” and “the objecthood of paint.” Made alongside the Mother paintings (2017–18), which explore notions of safety and fear, and the Purgatory paintings (2017–18), which consider the sublime through abstract and cartoon references, the Desert paintings (2016–18) are lush yet schematic interpretations of stills from Chuck Jones’s animated shorts featuring Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. In the very first episode, Fast and Furry-ous (1949), Coyote attempts to trick the Road Runner by painting a trompe l’oeil tunnel on the side of a cliff. To Coyote’s astonishment, the bird runs right through the tunnel without breaking stride, yet when he attempts hot pursuit, Coyote slams into the rockface, unable to enter the space of his own painting.
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.
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.
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.
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 Spring 2023 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Roe Ethridge’s Two Kittens with Yarn Ball (2017–22) on its cover.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Summer 2021 issue of Gagosian Quarterly is now available, featuring Carrie Mae Weems’s The Louvre (2006) on its cover.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Dan Colen speaks with Ali Subotnick on the occasion of his exhibition Dan Colen: Sweet Liberty, at the Newport Street Gallery in London.
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.
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.