NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of new work by Dan Walsh. The show will take place from February 18 through March 18, 2006 at 534 West 21st Street.

Since the early 1990s, Walsh has used a simple vocabulary of squares, lines and grids. Spare and geometric, yet also casual and hand-drawn, his works evoke the history of abstract painting (Noland, Albers, Stella, Martin and others), but their tongue-in-cheek attitude undercuts any pretense of loftiness. His early works, black or yellow lines on a white background, were like eccentric charts or diagrams transported into the realm of painting. Progressively integrating color into these pared-down environments, Walsh painted smooth, clearly contoured fields of color on which various shapes were displayed: floating squares and rectangles hung from bisecting horizontal lines or huddled together at the corner of the canvas, suggesting weight, volume or movement.

A recent shift in Walsh’s work finds him moving away from the display of shapes on the canvas and closer to the painting’s surface. His new paintings seem like fields of optical activity: grids of hypnotic concentric squares, shimmering horizontal lines, a light gray mass hovering over and partially obscuring a field of hot pink. The intense optical activity is reined it by deliberate, repeated forms, creating works that, though pulsating with color, also appear meditative and serene. With these paintings, Walsh invites the viewer to contemplate the effects of color and shape variations in the experience of perception.

Dan Walsh was born in 1960. His work has been exhibited in several national and international venues, including the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Centre d’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, France; and CCNOA (Art + Architecture) in Brussels, Belgium. His prints and limited-edition books were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Cabinet des Estampes and MAMCO, in Geneva, Switzerland. He was also included in the 2003 Ljubljiana Biennial, Slovenia, and the 2003 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, France. His work is currently on view at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, as part of The Painted World, an exhibition of abstract painting curated by Bob Nickas (through March 13, 2006).

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com