Blowin' in the Wind (Boot), 2011

Comes with original COA from Karma NY

Dan Colen's art combines the intensity of real life with reflection on the subjects of immanence and belief, taking up with the extant objects encountered along his wandering path in order to revitalize the very stuff and syntax of painting. In his painting exhibition "Trash" (2011), he tapped into the individual histories of abject materials, exposing their latent energies as painting tools, vestigial imprints, and physical elements that often remain attached to the canvas after the painting process. These fervid paintings readdressed mid-century painterly investigations of gravity and the flatbed picture plane, but unlike his predecessors' radical experiments where the paint or repurposed objects equaled the sum total of the work, Colen employed the spirited debris of the street—a flip-flop, a paint can, rags, string, bottles, a tire, and so on—as the means by which to move paint around on the canvas until they both—the tool and the medium—came to rest.

The "Blowin' in the Wind"series advances this investigation and includes readymade objects. Suspended from the wall, their proximate relationships deliver a striking aesthetic depth. Commonplace items, which Colen initially used as mark-making tools in the Trash series, become autonomous fetishes alluding to formalist assemblage. The beauty of each object resides in the physical manifestations of history—torn, mangled, and flecked with paint. Thus Colen continues to cultivate the marriage of spectacle and pure chance in relation to the materiality of the readymade and Modernist object and its aesthetic transcendence.