DAN CHRISTENSEN (1942-2007)

Obituary

Selected Exhibitions

Selected References


BIOGRAPHY

Among America’s leading abstract painters, Dan Christensen has been devoted over the course of the last forty years to exploring the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and pictorial form. Although his art belongs within the category defined by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg as Color Field or Post-Painterly Abstraction, he has both carried on the legacy of this approach while stepping outside of it, through drawing from a wide variety of Modernist sources, using many idiosyncratic techniques, and employing methods more commonly associated with the action painting techniques of Abstract Expressionism. The result is a distinctive body of work that is original, surprising, and filled with joy, exuberance, and pleasure in the act of painting.

Born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942, the son of a farmer and truck driver, Christensen chose to become an artist when, as a teenager, he saw the work of Jackson Pollock on a trip to Denver. After receiving his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, in 1964, he moved to New York City. His “spray loop” paintings, produced by using a spray paint gun, were a fascinating embodiment of the reductive abstract tendencies in 1960s American art, and of the interest of the time in innovative applications of new techniques. With their powerful ribbon-like configurations, and shimmering allover surface effects, these works won the attention of Greenberg, who became an enthusiastic supporter of Christensen’s art.

Christensen had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1967. Two years later he was given his first one-person show at the Andre Emmerich Gallery, joining this important showcase for color-field painting, where works by artists such as Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski and Helen Frankenthaler were also shown. Christensen soon started to be invited to participate in major museum shows, including the Whitney Annuals in New York and the Corcoran Gallery’s Biennials, in Washington, D.C. From the 1970s to the present, Christensen has been unrelenting in his exploration of new techniques as well as in his return in new ways to treat forms that had held his attention in the past.

In 2001 Christensen’s unique approach to line and shape was highlighted in the survey of his art held at the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio. He has received several awards, including a National Endowment Grant, 1968, a Guggenheim Fellowship Theodoran Award,

1969, a Gottlieb Foundation Grant, 1986, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, 1992. His art is included in many important public collections, including The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Eversen Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York; the Albrecht Art Gallery, St. Joseph, Missouri; the Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio; the Denver Museum of Art; the Edmonton Art Gallery, Alberta, Canada; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the High Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, Texas; Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Ludwig Collection in the Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri; the Robert Rowan Collection, Pasadena, California; St. Louis Art Museum, Missouri; the Seattle Art Museum, Washington; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; the Toledo Museum, Ohio; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Christensen, who began visiting eastern Long Island in the 1960s, lived in East Hampton until his death in 2007.

RC/ LNP

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