Dan Colen

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Dan Colen (born 1979, New Jersey) is an artist based in New York. He has been exhibited internationally by leading galleries such as Gagosian Gallery and featured in the USA Today exhibition at the Royal Academy in Fall 2006.[1]

[edit] Life and work

Dan Colen graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2001.

Colen’s work has been exhibited at galleries including Deitch Projects and Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York. He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including “Potty Mouth, Potty War, Pot Roast, Pot is a Reality Kick” at Gagosian Gallery [2] in New York, “USA Today” at the Royal Academy of Arts [3] in London, the 2006 Whitney Biennial [4] in New York, “Fantastic Politics” at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design [5] in Oslo and “No Me” at Peres Projects [6] in Berlin. He is represented by Peres Projects [7] in Los Angeles. He has several pieces in the Saatchi Gallery collection,[8] and in the Whitney’s permanent collection. Solo shows in include 5 Bathrooms 5 Paintings at the Gagosian Gallery in 2006,[9] and No Me at Peres Projects in Berlin.[10]

Dan Colen’s painted sculptural works are exercises in elaborate forgery that results in low-culture ephemera being transformed into high art monuments. Colen painstakingly recreates, or invents, pieces of cultural debris to give an apocryphal history of stoned good-times, downtown socializing and twenty-something social ritual to objects which are brand new. Colen’s work often features examples of spray-painted words that in reality have been created by meticulous brushwork. Colen’s faux-graffiti text paintings of random song lyrics and odd phrases are rendered on immaculately layered and sanded pieces of board, a perfect combination of apparent spontaneity time-consuming pursuit of perfection. In ‘Secrets and Cymbals, Smoke and Secrets: My Friend Dash’s Wall in the Future’ (2004), Colen built an exact replica of a section of poster, photo and flyer-covered wall from friend Dash Snow's apartment. Each piece of visual material was hand-made, every picture and news-clipping painted in exact detail and attached to a Styrofoam copy of the wall. In this and many other of Colen’s works the tension between high and low, deliberation and action and the personal and the monumental clash to spectacular effect. By transforming the inconsequential into the grand, Colen’s art places mass-media detritus and sub-cultural scrap in the spotlight.

His father, Sy Colen, a wood and clay sculptor, is a participant in the reality TV show Artstar.