dan colen
was born in New Jersey in 1979. He lives and works in New York. His artworks are included in public institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Greece; Hirschhorn Museum, Washington, D.C.; and Jimenez-Colon Collection, Ponce, Puerto Rico, to name a few. Colen’s recent solo exhibitions include “Peanuts,” Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Oslo (2011); “In Living Color,” FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2012); “Dan Colen: The Illusion of Life,” Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2013); “Help!,” The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2014); “The L...o...n...g Count,” The Walter De Maria Building, New York, (2014); “Dan Colen: Psychic Slayer,” HEART–Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2015); and “Dan Colen: Shake the Elbow,” Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2015), among others. His work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial in New York, as well as the 12th Biennale de Lyon in 2013. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Dallas Contemporary, opening April 15, 2016.
“When I’m Gone” has been Dan Colen’s first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. The exhibition hold at Gagosian Hong Kong from March to May 2016 has been dedicated to the Flower Paintings, begun in 2010.
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Residual petals and pistils, adhered by Colen’s own pressure, are reminders that these works exist in the physical, as well as metaphysical, world. The Flower Paintings demonstrate both Colen's persistent confrontation with the limitations of painting and his surrender to them. The aesthetic impressions are created by measures of force, rather than by the considered or impassioned painterly gesture. In these paintings, Colen has collapsed the distance between subject and object, the represented and the representative—the image of the flower, made by the flower—in his ongoing quest for what lies at the heart of the act of artistic transformation.