Dan Christensen: The Harmonious Turbulence of the Universe (Spray Paintings, 1988-1994)

DAN CHRISTENSEN THE HARMONIOUS TURBULENCE OF THE UNIVERSE SPR AY PAINTINGS (1988–1994)

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DAN CHRISTENSEN THE HARMONIOUS TURBULENCE OF THE UNIVERSE SPRAY PAINTINGS (1988–1994) FEBRUARY 10 – MARCH 12, 2022

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A L L I M A G E S © E S TAT E O F D A N C H R I S T E N S E N

DAN CHRISTENSEN (1942-2007)

T

hroughout his career, Dan Christensen was always moving forward but also looking back. His method was one of constantly seeking new ways of painting, and one inquiry would lead to another. However, in the process, he often returned to methods and materials he had explored earlier, reincorporating them in new iterations. With such a recombinant approach, his work is a commentary on the artistic process itself and becomes a cohesive whole when his oeuvre overall is considered.

Christensen first received recognition for his innovative use of the spray gun in the late 1960s. His early sprays were heralded by the critics for epitomizing an exuberant type of painting that broke from the sober formalism of Minimalism and that reclaimed

art traditions of the postwar years. In 1967, Christensen purchased his first spray gun from an autobody shop in a day before the airbrush became a popular artistic medium. With this difficult spray gun technique, Christensen first sought control with grid formats. He soon loosened up to create swirling, looping arcs with muscular force on huge vividly hued fields. While re-invoking the mark-making of action painting, the soft-edged gestures were not self-consciously gut-wrenching, but instead evinced a love of color and autonomous freedom, drawing the viewer into a directly visceral lyrical engagement.

In 1969, Christensen put aside the spray gun out of a desire for greater physical engagement in art making. In the two decades that followed, he continued to take risks with nontraditional media, and the new paints, gels, and extenders that came on the market. In the works of these years, he modified the viscosity of his surfaces with tools and staining methods in several series. In the stain paintings of 1976 through 1988, he used sticks, brushes, and turkey basters to produce calligraphic drawings into which he poured diluted pigments.

In his mood-evocative images, he drew from his responses to the natural world, especially in Springs, Long Island, New York, where he spent summers and eventually lived full-time, with his wife, the artist Elaine Grove, and their two young sons.

The thinned surfaces of the stains and their vivacity in new figure/ground relationships may have spurred Christensen to revisit the spray gun.

From 1988 through 1994, he again used spray as his sole medium, re-exploring the union of color and form, line and paint. Here instead of looping the spray across the surface, however he set spherical shapes in auras of light. Describing a show of these works at ACA Galleries in 1993, Lilly Wei called them “essentially modernist paintings,” commenting that in them, “Op art, Color Field, and Minimalism are brought up to date with an array of brilliant, often metallic colors played off against each other.”1 Brooks Adams remarked of Christensen’s show in 1991 at Salander O’Reilly Gallery: “the allover speckled texture of the acrylic spray paint, especially effective where two colors overlap yet do not blend, creates a feeling of low relief and suggests a blazing Pointillist sun.”2 In addition, instead of the lyricism and playfulness of the sprays of the 1960s, the new sprays, created with shimmering iridescent paint, are more metaphysical.

Continuing an ancient lineage in art of cosmological and celestial symbolism, their shimmering shapes imply the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres as well as atomic energy and matter. When Christensen was pressed for an explanation of the meaning of his art, he may have had the sprays of 1988 through 1994 in mind in the answer he provided: “the harmonious turbulence of the universe.”3 As his friend, the art dealer Douglas Drake recalled, the phrase, which he may have coined or borrowed, became almost his mantra.

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The works fall into three groups: spray portraits and sprays with single or multiple spheres. The portraits consist of orbs surrounded by concentric circles, cut off at a work’s edges to imply a sense of limitless space. In these images, Christensen explored scale with reference to the figurative art of his early career. In Blue Boy, 1988 (Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City), he referred to Gainsborough’s rococo portrait of 1770 (The Huntington Library, San Marino, California). In Pipeline (plate 1), a squarer format and a rounder center gives the image a softer, feminized, less aristocratic association, as if the middle is swathed by soft scarves. The elongated golden ellipse in Little Madonna (fig. 1) embodies the divine reverence implied in the work’s title and lifts us through its luminosity to the spiritual plane of enlightened beings in many faiths. Prismatic colors are filtered by a blinding white luminescence in Orisha (plate 3), a title that refers to an avatar in the Yoruba religion of Olodumare, a supreme being too immense for the human mind to grasp. The painting’s reverberating planetary rings that our perceptual skills cannot readily differentiate are a visualization of its mystical subject.

Single-spot sprays are necessarily centripetal, but they are far from inert. The dark red solar center of Brazen Bronze (plate 2) seems to push forward at high velocity through interstellar space, leaving its irradiated corona visible. Yellow Rose calls to mind the targets of Jasper Johns and Kenneth Noland, but Christensen animated this form with his own stamp, producing blurred shapes that seem to spin and react magnetically and atmospherically. With its pupil-like red-orange center surrounded by a yellow rim, the painting objectifies us in its direct gaze.

It demonstrates how these works can metamorphize from the spectral to the intimate. Another such work, Second Striker, is more relaxed, its dark green outer circle suggesting a portal toward a small red center that could be a dying star. By its title, Pangea, denotes a supercontinent centered on the equator, that

FIG.2. DOUBLE PL AY, 1992, ACRY LIC ON C AN VA S, 35½ X 40 IN.

existed in the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras and broke apart at the end of the Triassic period. Accordingly, the center is large and overheated, the blue combustible flame around it, anticipating an imminent explosion.

Multi-spot works are relationship-driven. Some consist of two equal spheres. Among them is Deuce Coupe—its title referencing a 1932 Ford and its headlights—in which there is a respectful distance between the orange circles in the complementary lavender of the elongated rectangular format. Juneau (plate 4) is more confrontational, with the whites of glaring headlights filling the space and expanding beyond it, into ours. Other works feature two or more unequal shapes. In Double Play (fig. 2), a small pendant outlined in orange is weightier than the much larger oval that spans the work. The two medallion-like shapes in red and turquoise against a lavender background give Retro Red (plate 5) a brooch-like aspect, but Christensen also makes the decorative nature of the work consciously humorous in its blown-up scale. There is greater spatial depth in Bass Casio, in which the monumental scale has a planetarium immersiveness, while the electric guitar of the title creates a sense of the jazz and classical music that reverberates through all of Christensen’s art. Darkness of Crete’s (plate 7) three shapes—two dark circles and one aquamarine ovoid—glimmer in a navy-blue penumbra, engaging the eye and mind in shifting visual sensations or water, sky, and the universe.

Created during a time when Christensen was settled in his life and well-established in his art, the sprays he painted between 1988 and 1994 seem outward-rather than inward-driven, suggestive of an artist reflecting not as much on himself as on the cosmic and eternal.

Christensen received a National Endowment Grant in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. His paintings are held in over thirty museum collections, including the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Cleveland Museum of Art; the Denver Art Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City; Princeton Art Museum, New Jersey; the Seattle Art Museum; the Saint Louis Art Museum; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and many others. Berry Campbell Gallery in Chelsea represents Christensen’s estate.

—Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D.

1

Lilly Wei, “Dan Christensen at ACA Galleries,” Art in America 81 (July 1993), p. 33.

2

Brooks Adams, “Dan Christensen at Salander O’Reilly and Douglas Drake,” Art in America 79 (December 1991), p. 107.

3

Douglas Drake, “Remembrances of Dan,” in Dan Christensen: Forty Years of Painting, exh. cat. (Kansas City: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art), p. 25.

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ABOUT BERRY CAMPBELL Christine Berry and Martha Campbell opened Berry Campbell Gallery in the heart of Chelsea on the ground floor in 2013. The gallery has a fine-tuned program representing artists of post-war American painting that have been overlooked or neglected, particularly women of Abstract Expressionism. Since its inception, the gallery has developed a strong emphasis in research to bring to light artists overlooked due to race, gender, or geography. This unique perspective has been increasingly recognized by curators, collectors, and the press. The gallery’s contemporary program continues this exploration. Contemporary works were acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln Nebraska; and the Telfair Museums, Savannah, Georgia, amongst others.

Berry Campbell has been included and reviewed in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Artforum, Architectural Digest, Art & Antiques, The Brooklyn Rail, the Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, East Hampton Star, Artcritical, Luxe Magazine, the New Criterion, the New York Times, Vogue, and Whitehot Magazine of Contemporary Art.

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