Dan Christensen: Atmospherics

DAN CHRISTENSEN ATMOSPHERICS

MAY 15 - JUNE 21. 2015

LewAllenGalleries Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com cover: Untitled, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 101.5” x 75”

ATMOSPHERICS: Color is the Message

May 15 - June 21, 2015 created during an era in which some critics said painting was exhausted and others claimed it was dead. Certainly Christensen heard this but, as an artist of independent spirit—and happily for art history—he was undaunted in his iconoclastic allegiance to the potential of painting.

Despite the proliferation of alternative art forms around him, Christensen delighted in pioneering new uses of pure color and odd tools to energize the power of abstract painting in the pursuit of Modernism’s continuing ideal to produce the genuinely new.

Christensen’s spirited use of spray guns to create paintings like “Untitled (1968)” with woozy atmospheres of freely merging hue and wildly dancing threads of color, coincided with the new social impetus in the ’60s toward individual and group liberations of all sorts. This new aura characteristic of the times seems channeled by Christensen into his paintings with big muscular gestures unabashedly sprayed, the kind of colorful loops seen reprised in “Dolan” (1988), as well as the more ethereal squiggles floating freely on misty backgrounds as in “Untitled” (1968). With this exuberant bravura Christensen blithely forged new aesthetic ground and in the process produced painted analogs to the psychedelic rock, rhythm and blues, dreamy poetry, free love and strenuous activism of those high times. In his work, Christensen took joy in expressing what he called the “harmonious turbulence of the universe.”

Both brilliance and liveliness are labels befitting the work of Christensen, work that ranges over a career spanning more than 40 years and extending across a prodigious breadth of styles and periods. As a master of vivacious color, riveting composition, adventuresome techniques and the physicality of paint, Christensen used extraordinary combinations of these elements to code into his work imprints of inner enthusiasms, curiosities and joys. These brought remarkable energy to work recognized today as some of the finest “new direction” abstract painting of the post-Abstract Expression period.

A new exhibition at LewAllen Galleries consists of more than 20 major paintings—many classics in the history of American Abstraction and of museum caliber—from Christensen’s celebrated “spray” and “plaid” series. They vividly illustrate Christensen’s extraordinary capacity to coalesce onto canvas layers of paint, arrays of color, wellplaced line, and exciting juxtapositions of shapes in order to effect nearly alchemical transfigurations from the artist’s imagination and emotions into physical works as immediate and sensate for the viewer as they were for him.

Much of Christensen’s best work, including several examples in this show, was produced in the 1960s (the “early spray” paintings, revisited again in the ’80s with work such as “Dolan”) and the 1970s (the “plaid” paintings ), both

Untitled #69, 1971, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 75” x 88”

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important markers, both of a time of major cultural import within American social history and as pioneering alterations to the visual context of abstract art. The work was also lauded by many critics as utilizing some of the most original methods of the time and brought Christensen his initial success and recognition as one of the leading practitioners of the new “lucidness” in approach to modern art. Indeed, Greenberg declared Christensen to be “one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.”

Critic Clement Greenberg looked at this new emphasis on elements of painting such as expressive “openness” and “clarity,” of which Christensen’s pioneering work was a significant part, and famously labeled it “post-painterly abstraction.” He and others saw in this new direction a “purity” of color, distinctness of structure, and “openness” of composition which was regarded as the important next step in the progressive evolution of contemporary art in the wake of Abstract Expressionism’s dissipated vitality and mimicked excesses.

A principal aspect of Christensen’s personality and his brilliance as an artist was his insatiable curiosity and drive for continuous experimentation. He constantly hungered to move on, to attempt new modes of expression, work with new tools, try new types of paint and methods of application.

The loops and squiggles as well as sprayed stacks of folded color ribbons as in “Times Square” (1967) stand today as

Perhaps nowhere in Christensen’s career can this be observed more vividly than when, as he entered the new decade of the ’70s, he decided he had done what he set out to do with sprays and yearned for a new means to put more paint on the canvas. Elaine Grove, Christensen’s wife, describes it as his desire for greater “bravado of the hand.”

In pursuit of this goal, Christensen moved to a process that indeed brought his hands into closer proximity with the paint itself as he abandoned for the time being the intermediated device of the spray gun and turned instead to the squeegee and house-paint roller that afforded his hand more direct control of paint application. Using these, Christensen was now able to apply more generous amounts of acrylic and oil-based enamel, pulling them in broad strokes to produce planes and shapes of warm solid colors.

The result came to be called the “plaid” paintings. With these paintings, Christensen moved away from the freeform swirls and ribbons of the sprays—indeed away from the curve itself—and toward a dramatically more ordered pictorial image centered on planar geometry and involving angular forms of rectangles, triangles, and thick stripes of varying sizes and arranged in configurations of adjacent color fields. One of the earliest masterpieces of this series is “Untitled (1969)” in which lateral extensions of four vertical bands of arresting pure color are woven with two horizontal ones, set on an eight-foot tall white field.

The velocity of soaring verticality and the solidity of the horizontal anchor create a dramatic assertion that color alone can be graphic expression.

April Treat, 1971, oil & acrylic on canvas, 54” x 32.5”

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and edge delineation between color shapes and who, unlike Christensen, sometimes used shaped canvases.

As other works in this exhibition, such as “Chinese Afternoon (1970)” and “Red Liner (1970)” demonstrate, Christensen did not always crisscross or interlock the bands of alternating color in symmetrical order as the name “plaid” might suggest, but rather laid out swaths of vertical and horizontal stripes in a more improvisational arrangement.

The joints between one shape and another were not sharp and precise so much as slightly undulating, a feature that both captures the eye and confers a more painterly and energetic feeling to the otherwise formal sense of geometry.

By combining both oil-based enamel and acrylic in the same work, Christensen achieved in the plaid paintings unique surface effects from the contrasts between flatter acrylic areas and glossier enamel ones. The combination also helped confer additional lively energy to his work and, combined with the organic pigments he used, as in “April Treat (1971),” and the often-wavy lines between the spaces each color occupied, these surfaces added to the painterly distinctiveness of Christensen’s approach to color and geometric relationships. These plaid paintings, like the spray paintings, have stood the test of time, found favor among numerous important collectors and been exhibited in significant museum shows.

To make the “plaids,” Christensen would staple pieces of unstretched canvas—often large in scale—to the carpeted floor of his studio and using rollers and squeegees attached to broomsticks, he would apply areas of paint. He usually did not mask off his shapes, thus allowing the intersections of the areas to exhibit the loose, hand-drawn “bravado.”

This gave these paintings a clearly executant look and a greater sense of spontaneity in contrast to the more mechanical feel of works by other color field practitioners of the time— notably Kenneth Noland, Larry Zox, Frank Stella, and others—who often preferred more precise symmetry

Though very different in pictorial concern, the sprays and plaids demonstrate a consistent and unifying element within Dan Christensen’s varied and dynamic lifetime of work: the power of color to ignite emotions and carry his creative DNA. Indeed, in describing Christensen as one of America’s elite artistic talents, Butler Museum director Louis Zona wrote “it is in the application of color that we come to understand the essence of Christensen’s genius. For him color is not a component of the work—it is the work.”

For Christensen, color in various hues and intensities, shapes and forms, textures and configurations, was the message—the words of a visual poetry or music that in turn communicated his ideas about the importance of individual freedom, the key role of experimentation in the creative enterprise, and the life-affirming joy resident within beauty and aesthetic enjoyment. Christensen’s expression of these are timeless and make his paintings— both despite and because they resulted from his constant passion for creative innovation—enduring in their appeal and visual interest. And, as with great poetry and music, the more one experiences these stunning paintings, the more the meanings deepen and enrich. They distinguish him as a thoughtful yet spontaneously authentic artist with honest ideas tirelessly expressed in numerous pictorial forms. In doing so in these paintings and those from the other genres of his varied oeuvre, Christensen consistently moved forward the vitality of abstraction as a continuing and important part of art history.

– Kenneth R. Marvel

Untitled, 1968, acrylic on canvas, 50” x 40”

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Times Square, 1967, acrylic on canvas, 69.5” x 69.5”

Chinese Afternoon, 1970, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 106” x 81”

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Dolan, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 60.5” x 43”

Red Liner, 1970, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 102” x 75”

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Land’s End, 1971, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 78” x 116.5”

Night Game, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 66.25” x 56.25”

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Red Liner #2, 1971, acrylic on canvas, 44” x 9”

Untitled, 1970, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 88” x 20”

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Hornet, 1970, enamel on canvas, 78” x 39”

Night Delight, 1969, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 93” x 34”

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Easy Over, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 51.25” x 45.25”

Greystroke, 1970, enamel & acrylic on canvas, 100.5” x 52”

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Valium Blue, 1972, enamel on canvas, 78” x 34”

Radio Ways, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 14.5” x 99”

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Zero IV, 1989, acrylic on canvas, 10” x 70”

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Laurel Canyon, 1969, acrylic on canvas, 23” x 115”

Zero II, 1988, acrylic on canvas, 10” x 63”

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Dan Christensen SELECTED MUSEUM COLLECTIONS Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art Gallery, St. Joseph, MO Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL Blanton Museum of American Art, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX Boca Raton Museum of Art, Youngstown, OH Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, NY High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN The Jepson Center of Contemporary Art, Telfair Museum, Savannah, GA Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Kunstmuseum, St. Gallen, Switzerland Ludwig Collection in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Mulvane Art Museum, Washburn University, Topeka, KS Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, FL Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Boston, MA Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NE Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Houston, TX Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY Portland Museum of Art, Portland, OR San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Santa Barbara Museum of Modern Art, Santa Barbara, CA Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1942, Born, Cozad, NE 1964, B.F.A., Kansas City Art Institute 2007, Died, East Hampton, NY SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2015 “Dan Christensen: Atmospherics,”

LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

“Dan Christensen,”

Berry Campbell, New York, NY 2013 “Dan Christensen: The Orb Paintings,”

LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM 2012-13 “Dan Christensen: The Early Sprays, 1967-1969” Spanierman Modern, New York, NY 2011 “Dan Christensen: Bars and Scrapes,”

LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

“Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings,”

Spanierman Modern, New York, NY

“The Armory Show: Dan Christensen,”

Spanierman Modern, New York, NY 2010 Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, FL 2009 LewAllen Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE

Spanierman Modern, New York, NY

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO 2008 Elaine Baker Gallery, Boca Raton, FL 2007 LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM

Spanierman Gallery, East Hampton, NY

Spanierman Modern, New York, NY 2005 Skot Foreman Gallery, Atlanta, GA 2004 Ed Thorp Gallery, New York, NY 2002-03 Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY 2001-02 The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH 1982-99 Salander O’Reilly Galleries, New York, NY

(and other numerous solo exhibitions at this gallery’s

locations in New York and Beverly Hills) 1994 Gallery ISM, Seoul, Korea 1993 ACA Galleries, New York, NY 1987 Lincoln Center Gallery, New York, NY 1978-84 Meredith Long and Company, Houston, TX

(solo exhibitions in New York and Houston) 1982 Ivory/Kimpton Gallery, San Francisco, CA 1980 University of Nebraska at Omaha Art Gallery, Omaha, NE 1969-76 Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

Watson/de Nagy Gallery, Houston, TX 1970, 1972 Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1969, 1971 Galerie Ricke, Cologne, Germany 1967 Noah Goldowsky Gallery, New York, NY (Richard Bellamy, Curator)

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Railyard Arts District | 1613 Paseo de Peralta | Santa Fe, New Mexico 87501 | tel 505.988.3250 www.lewallengalleries.com | info@lewallengalleries.com Š 2015 LewAllen Contemporary LLC Artwork Š Estate of Dan Christensen