* 1960 in Philadelphia, PA (USA)

Lives & works in Brooklyn, NY (USA)

 

“Dan Walsh became known in the early 90s through a group of abstract paintings which followed a path different from that of the "appropriationist" work of the precedent generation. In essence, Dan Walsh considered painting a tool to bring back into play the mechanisms of perception, and not as a simple instrument of criticism. In the first of these works he proposed, through black and yellow lines executed in freehand, basic frames of perception. Over the years, these were succeeded by colored surfaces connected to each other by continual or broken lines. From then on the painting evolved into a potential exhibition space, with different possible pictures mises en abyme: it was left to the viewer to sort out a complex situation of perception, where a painting can be a wall, or a wall a painting. This crossover is most evident in the books that the artist produced starting in 1998. He is of course aware that, from the '60s on, printed work presented one of the possible forms an exhibition could take. For Dan Walsh, publication, usually of a small hand-crafted edition, provides a field for experimentation, a laboratory of ideas, where past and future paintings can converse, free from the constraints of chronology.”