Dan Walsh

Galerie Xippas is pleased to announce Dan Walsh’s third solo-show, in which he will present eight new paintings. The exhibition will open on Friday, May 29th, and run through July 31st, 2010. This exhibition coincides with a retrospective presentation of Dan Walsh artists’ books at the bookstore and gallery, & : Christophe Daviet-Thery in Paris.

Since the beginning of the 1990’s, Dan Walsh’s paintings have explored a minimalist and geometric vein in which the fragility of the gesture is called into question. His paintings are provisional structures that project the idea of space through their lines, their concentric squares, their grids….(dis)orienting the viewer’s gaze. And, at the same time, are constantly engaging in a game of occupying the surface with the uncertainty of the raised hand, with the supposed intelligence of a paintbrush, where the regularity of patterns is often the result of an instinctual judgment.

Like all fundamentally non-narrative works, Dan Walsh’s paintings do not prohibit fictional links with the real, with climates, personal memories, or analogies with the domination of the screen over vision, reframed and orthogonal, so common to our everyday experiences. But above all, the paintings create a tension that lies in the present instant of viewing, like a sweet hysteria, of the surface. A prominent colorist, Dan Walsh explores chromatic scales without limits, going from neutral grays to encounters or super-positions of incredibly lyrical and sometimes surprising colors. The lightness of the acrylic paint permits Walsh to leave a mark that is both stroke and trace which invites the viewer to a double reading that balances between the reconstitution of a process—a slow occupation of the surface and an apprehension of its totality.

Dan Walsh hangs his paintings very low, and thus he creates empathy for the surface whose chromatic vibrations and geometry bring out a feeling of its weight, its pulse, its harmony, its tensions.

An array of references to minimalism, De Stijl, kinetic and hypnotic art, Tibetan Mandalas echo throughout the canvases, and the viewer poses his or her gaze on a fragment of time where the colored traces reveal an absolute interiority of the spirit and the gesture.

Dan Walsh was born in Philadelphia in 1960. He lives and works in New York. He studied as an undergraduate at the Philadelphia College of Art and received an MFA from Hunter College, New York. He is represented by the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, where he recently had a much acclaimed solo-show called Days and Nights. Among his numerous one-person exhibitions, his work has recently been presented at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de la Synagogue de Delme (France), the Biennale Ljubljana (Slovenia), the Cabinet des Estampes du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire / Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva (Switzerland) and the Indianapolis Museum of Art (USA). In 2003, Walsh participated in the Biennale d’Art Contemporain in Lyon, France. In 2006 and 2009, he was included in USA Today and Abstract America: New Painting and Sculpture at the Saatchi Gallery in London.