Dan Colen
Stoned to Death, 2012
Flower pigment on linen 24.5 x 19 cm
Dan Colen (b. 1979 in USA) has one focus in his work and one thing that keeps his artistry together over the years. And that is exploration, as told to Henri Neuendorf in an interview on the occasion of the opening of his large exhibition with Lévy Gorvy in New York last year. Dan Colen, together fellow artists Ryan MacGinley and Nate Lowman, came to fame some 15 years ago. Their unrespectful attitude towards the art world was refreshing and they created great scandals, but more importantly, even greater shows. Dan Colen has continued to work with different materials, but painting and the questioning of the material itself, has been a recurrent focal point. What happens if you paint with other materias than paint? Is the work still a painting? When does the materia become the subject matter? In 2010 Dan Colen started to work on his Flower paintings, investigating the relationship between the classic subject matter of the flower, and what happens if you take the essence out of th subject, its pigment, to create a painting with. This work from 2012 is a wonderful example of the Flower Paintings, an Dan Colen is now represented not only by Gagosian Gallery but also by the prestigious Lévy Gorvy.
