Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Dan Christensen

Christensen enthusiasts: take note!

Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting which opened at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, in May will move to the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln on October 23, 2009 and remain on view until the end of January, 2010.

The show’s press release states: “This survey of his paintings documents [Christensen’s] never-ending quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Often placed within the Color Field movement, Christensen’s experimentation with tools and techniques make him resistant to any one label or category but do place him among this country’s most ambitious abstract and gestural painters. Art critic Clement Greenberg called his work ‘post-painterly abstraction’ and said, in 1990, ‘Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.’”

A catalogue, by the noted art historian Karen Wilkin, accompanies the exhibition.
Another exhibition of the artist’s work, Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings, will be on view at Spanierman Modern, New York from October 13 to November 14, 2009.

Christensen’s plaids, such as Night Delight at left, were described by Jim Monte, curator at the Whitney Museum in the 1970s, as offering “a very unique contribution to the history of pure abstraction…a freshly conceived approach to geometric configuration, a necessary antidote to that all-consuming dullness” of much of the Minimal painting of the 1960s and 1970s.

Additional information on this exhibition will be available soon.

Read more on Dan Christensen.

1 comment:

  1. As a side note the Sheldon Museum has done a nice podcast on Dan Christensen. Its only 5 mins and gives a good sense of Christensen's time in Nebraska. Scroll to the bottom of this page and click to listen:
    http://www.sheldonartmuseum.org/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions.html?topic=detail&exb_id=114&category_sent=Upcoming+Exhibitions

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