Dan Walsh

Paula Cooper is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Dan Walsh. Expanding his investigation into system-based abstraction, Walsh’s new paintings appear effortless and inevitable despite the exacting process of their making. The composition of each painting is grounded along the lower edge and employs a vocabulary of unit-based forms—including lines, circles, lozenges, and rectangles, with some structured around a loose pyramidal shape. Walsh softens the geometry of the grid with movement, rounding the edges to form dynamic compositions illuminated in vibrant color. Subtle chromatic variations in paintings such as Rally, 2023, delight and trick the eye, playing with figure and ground and necessitating a curiously engaged looking. Of another painting in the show, Call, 2022, critic Bob Nickas has written:

The image simultaneously evokes electronic circuitry and Pacific Northwest totems, technological as well as symbolic visual languages, equally encoded—his image seemingly carved to be imprinted / painted. […] Call, in its pared down chromatics and “perforations,” also calls to mind wood veneers that have been incised, or a template from which other images may be generated.[1]

Rather than using preparatory drawings, Walsh has described how the logic of a painting reveals itself to him during its making, and the appearance of each work can change dramatically during the weeks spent systematically layering brushstrokes. This way of working arises from the artist’s equally prolific output in printmaking and artist’s books, mediums characterized by their inherent seriality. Also borrowed from his work with paper is the somewhat surprisingly handmade quality of the paintings, which activate his images with transformative humanism.

Dan Walsh (b. 1960, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is a painter, printmaker, bookmaker, and sculptor. Walsh’s work has been exhibited in venues throughout the U.S. and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the New Museum, New York; the Centre national d’art contemporain, Nice; The Rhode Island School of Design Art Museum, Providence; and The Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Geneva, Switzerland. In 2023, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, presented Dan Walsh: Minimalist at Play, an exhibition of artist’s books by Walsh from the museum’s collection. Walsh has also been included in the Ljubljiana Biennial, Slovenia, the Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, France, and the Whitney Biennial (2014). In 2019, his work was the subject of a retrospective of ten years of work at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City; and the Musée d’art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva, among other institutions.

1 - Bob Nickas, Dan Walsh: The Process of Painting (Geneva and Zurich: JRP | Editions and Galerie Tschudi, 2023), p. 10.