Dan Walsh
Born in 1960 in Philadelphia (Pennsylvania, US), Dan Walsh lives and works in New York.
Since the early 1990s, Dan Walsh has developed painted artworks that etch the fragility of movement in a modernist and geometric vein. His compositions are free hand paintings that transgress the objective purity of minimalism. The forms and colors are often atmospheric in nature. Situated behind an arrangement of colored stones forming curved lines and round angles, his paintings produce a sensation of floating and a strange delicateness.
Through the abstraction and the simplification of forms, each painting corresponds to a certain resonance or a table of potential elements, similar to the Tibetan Mandalas: this allows the painting to snatch the spectator’s attention and influence his reflection. For Dan Walsh, painting is a pertinent medium, “as long as it is a means for an individual to make sense of the world, and the commitment it requires is shared with the public.” Therefore the painting is not simply a critical tool. Above all else, it symbolizes the place where we can explore and question mechanisms of perception. Oscillating between systemic rigidity and mastered freedom, the structure of his paintings evolves like a mandala, occasionally defying the laws of optics by creating the illusion of movement.
His work has been shown in Bonnefanenmuseum (Maastricht), Williams College Museum of Art (Williamstown), Centre d’art contemporain (Delme), Museum of Contemporary Art (Tuscon), Espace d’art contemporain (Geneva), but also in MAMCO (Geneva), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), MoMa (New York), Kunsthalle Bern (Bern), to name few.
Public collections : MoMa (US), Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (US), Wadsworth Athaneum (US), Jumex Collection (Mexico), New York Public Library (US), Cabinet des Estampes (Switzerland), Yale University Library (US), Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (Belgium), FNAC (France), Collezione Maramotti (Italy), The Saatchi Gallery (UK)
