PREVIEW: Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting
May 2009
By Peter Plagens
Dan Christensen was a painter. That's, he was a painter. Like, a P-A-I-N-T-E-R. Christensen graduated in 1964 from the Kansas City Art Institute and began, well, painting about painting. And he was canny enough to narrow down his subject matter to composition, color, and--mais oui!--the way paint behaves on canvas. He was also gutsy enough to try almost any way--from grids of muted color blocks to ropy, aerobatic, candy-color sprays-of combining those elements to arrive at some sort of visual poetry: He scraped, he stained, and his color ranged from tastefully tan to psychedelically bright. Did all of his paintings turn out to be masterpieces? No. But enough of them are beautiful and different from the work of other "color painters" to merit this thirty-five-work retrospective. Travels to the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE, Oct. 23, 2009-Jan. 31, 2010. View PDF version

LINEA
Journal of the Arts Student League of New York
Remembering Dan Christensen
Vol. 13 No. 1, Spring 2009
By Ronnie Landfield
This spring the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri will host a memorial retrospective exhibition of the abstract paintings of Dan Christensen. The exhibition Dan Christensen:Forty Years of Painting will cover his work from his early days in New York City in the mid-1960s through his final years living and working in The Springs, outside of East Hampton, Long Island. Christensen died after a long illness on January 20, 2007. This exhibition is a celebration of his life's work as a unique artist, a vital and successful abstract painter associated with Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting, and Lyrical Abstraction. Read More

ART IN AMERICA
Dan Christensen: Fluid Line, Funky Beat
June/July 2007
An overview of the abstract painter's 40-year career samples his restless exploration of widely varied methods, tools, and pictorial possibilities.
By Karen Wilkin
A useful Cliche, "painter's painter" connotes not only excellence and dedication but also master at a level that can be best appreciated by fellow initiates. That the term can be applied with perfect accuracy to Dan Christensen was made clear by a recent mini-retrospective at Spanierman Modern, a well-chosen selection of ebullient abstract canvases spanning the four decades from 1967 to 2006. Read More

ART KNOWLEDGE NEWS
Kemper Museum to show Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting
Feb. 20, 2009


KANSAS CITY, MO - For more than forty years, American artist Dan Christensen--long associated with the Color Field movement--experimented with colors, shapes, and forms in his large-scale paintings. Featuring 35 of the artist’s works of art from 1966 to 2006, the exhibition Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting is the first comprehensive Museum retrospective of the artist’s work since his death in 2007. The exhibition is on view May 15 through August 30, 2009, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

The exhibition Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting opens with a free public reception, 5:30–7:30 p.m., Friday, May 15. After its showing at the Kemper Museum, the exhibition travels to the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where it is on view October 23, 2009–January 31, 2010.

This survey of his paintings documents his never-ending quest to understand the possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. Often placed within the Color Field movement, Christensen’s experimentation with tools and techniques make him resistant to any one label or category but do place him among this country’s most ambitious abstract and gestural painters. Art critic Clement Greenberg called his work “post-painterly abstraction” and said, in 1990, “Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.”



Born in 1942, Christensen was raised in Cozad, Nebraska. A 1964 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, the artist moved to New York in the 60s after a brief stop at the University of Indiana. Once in New York, he found immediate critical acclaim for the originality of his “ribbon” and “loop” paintings, created by using a spray gun. His works were featured in the Whitney Museum of American Art's annual exhibitions in 1967, 1968, 1969, and in its first biennial in 1973. In 1968, he was awarded a National Endowment Grant and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969.

During the 1970s, he began experimenting with new tools, paints, and techniques, and created the geometric color-field “plaid” paintings. His style continued to evolve with the “scrape” and “calligraphic” paintings of the ‘80s, and “spot” paintings—some of the most celebrated of his career--of the ‘90s. His later work reveals a return to fluid, rhythmic loops that pulse and whir with life.

Christensen’s works of art are in public and private collections around the world, and paintings for this exhibition were culled from his estate; Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO; Saint Louis Art Museum; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; and private collections.

Visit the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art at : http://www.kemperart.org/

View original article on the Art Knowledge News website.


If you wish further information, please email Christine Berry