Anton van Dalen

This story starts with a man—Anton van Dalen. His past: Amsterdam—war, education, immigration. New York City. An artist, now 77 years-old. 45 years spent living on Avenue A and 11st St. Here, you can see his home, in miniature, hand-made from paper and cardboard. His body is here too, in miniature, made from cardboard, flying his pigeons on his paper roof. Downtown Manhattan extending into infinite space.

The East Village in the 70’s, a distant cry from what it is today—full of drugs, violence, fun, and leisure, tinged with melancholia. You might have lived this New York, heard stories of its past. Anton made art about what he saw in his neighborhood throughout the 70’s—streetwalkers, needles, burnt-out cars. Sleek and sexy black graphite drawings, 3-dimensional shadow boxes—his theaters. And true to the theater, even a viewer in the front row sits facing the scene, a few feet separate from the performers themselves.

Like Hopper or van Gogh or Bearden, van Dalen was an observer of the world around him, documenting and internalizing. Not a beatnik, not a hippy.

Then, through this, elements start to shift in his work, reality starts to slip. The devils veil, crystalline, falls through the gaps of his position as observer, his position of separation. Ideas come flooding in, many of them difficult to swallow. A drawing of four dogs, each almost identical to the other. Implicative of pop art in their repetition but each devotedly hand drawn. A dog will lick his wounds to heal, but often the dog finds it hard to stop… society as cyclical, the abuser fuses with the abused, a dark inspiration.

What happens when the body becomes the world around it? We are consumed by the symbols of our desire. A true manifestation of the grotesque—human meets machine, they are level with one another, the hinge between left invisible, indecipherable. The desire for the object is an object itself, a thing that moves, tastes, feels, sees, fucks. A heaving humanoid body, laden with its weight of the world, dragging itself through the void, through the thick mud of ages to come say hello.

The digestive tract of cultural consciousness—this soul, glowing in LED.

Anton draws this collective self, this version of ourselves we might perhaps be disgusted by—this art we might be disgusted by—rendering it with beautiful intimacy.

How can we comment on the troubles of the world? We, patrons to the theater of life, the artists, the writers, the gallery goers? We feel ashamed; as we look away, the glow of the screen flashes, illuminates the side of our face—in that moment, we are beautiful.

Anton van Dalen b. Amsterdam 1938 grew up in the Netherlands during World War II in a strict Calvinist family. He studied Graphic arts at the Amsterdam Grafische School, 1952-54. After immigrating to North America in 1965 he worked in graphics and animation for CBC television, all black and white, mainly 4:3 format. Anton has been living in New York, raising a family and making and showing artwork here for 51 years. He is represented by P·P·O·W Gallery. His recent exhibitions include an upcoming show at Sargent's Daughters, May 18 - June 18, New Work, P·P·O·W, New York (2015), I, YOU, WE, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2013), Come Closer: Art Around The Bowery, 1969-1989, New Museum, New York (2012). His work was recently acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art.