Dan Colen at Gagosian Gallery (Rome)

Dan Colen
Gagosian Gallery
19 September – 29 October 2011

Working from personal experience with subjects often overlooked or considered rogue and delinquent by art and society, Colen explores the very essence of dichotomy through risk and affect, juggling immediacy of expression with technical perfection. Slipperiness of meaning results from his painstaking reconstruction of ‘what might have been’; paintings whose apparent incidental qualities – from showered confetti and heavily accreted bird droppings to scrawled song lyrics, random thoughts, and absurd slogans –are, in fact, the result of an expert and painstaking brush technique over equally obsessively crafted surfaces; sculptures that feign the inadvertent monuments and sites on which popular culture inscribes its traces; and in the inverse play of editing, subcontracting, stealing, and transposing.

Dan Colen was born in New Jersey in 1979. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2001. Exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “USA Today,” The Royal Academy, London; “Defamation of Character,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York; and “Fantastic Politics,” The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.

Gagosian Gallery’s current exhibition “Made in Italy,” a group show curated by Mario Codognato, will be on show until 29 July. Marking the 150th anniversary of Italy’s unification, the exhibition maps an unexpected Italian journey through works by internationally recognized artists of the past sixty years: from Alberto Giacometti to Jeff Koons, Andy Warhol to Roy Lichtenstein, and Marcel Duchamp to Damien Hirst.