Dan Walsh

NEW YORK—Dan Walsh will present a selection of new abstract paintings at Paula Cooper Gallery, 534 West 21st Street, from 20 February to 22 March, 2003. This is the artist’s fourth one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Dan Walsh’s paintings are, in a sense, perceptual propositions: they present the viewer with a simplified vocabulary of lines and shapes interacting in and out of relation to one another, allowing for a variety of visual experiences. Lined-up squares float over wide expanses of color, as though suspended; a sagging line stretches across the canvas, suggesting weight; simple forms with echoing outlines seem to pulse; receding rectangles piled onto one another evoke a staircase or a podium. Each work combines, in visual form, different elements of a question. The viewer is made aware of the mostly unconscious choices involved in translating an optical experience into a cognitive one.

Dan Walsh’s work grows out of a continued interest in the history of abstract painting and in bringing to bear the language of modern abstraction. His early work was resolutely geometric, albeit with a casual twist, its rectilinearity softened by hand-drawn lines and rounded edges. His pared-down compositions of black lines, squares or grids on white backgrounds wittily alluded to their mundane, artless counterparts such as flow charts or diagram sketches. His interest in formal notions of volume and perimeter led him to intervene directly in architectural space, using black tape to bring out certain proportions on walls or highlight angles and corners. Walsh progressively incorporated sensuous, lush color into his individualized formal vocabulary, producing vibrant large-scale paintings and diptychs.

The current exhibition is, in the artist’s own words, “a more embodied, lived-through experience while examining these [perceptual and historical] issues.”

Dan Walsh was born in 1960, and lives and works in New York. In 2002, his prints and limited edition books were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Cabinet des Estampes, Geneva. His work has been exhibited at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, L’espace lausannois d’art contemporain, Lausanne, and The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, among others.

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