Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on January 9, 2007 of Dan Christensen, an exhibition of twenty-three paintings by the leading American artist to carry on the legacy of Color Field painting. Including works rendered by Christensen from the 1960s to the present, the show reveals the artist’s dedication throughout the decades to expanding the limits, range, and possiblities of paint and form through a process involving both systematic and spontaneous methods. Mediating between the traditions of the gestural art of Jackson Pollock and the pared down logic of the works of Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland, Dan Christensen has forged a unique path within the trajectory of abstract painting that continues to evolve today. Sophisticated, yet playful, his works have been described aptly as conjuring “an inner luminescence that creates an understated, though decidedly exuberant, ambiance.”

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. Within two years, he rose quickly to fame, as part of a group of young artists who revived painting after a period in which Minimalism had prevailed. Dating from this period, Times Square (1967) is among the stacked “spray loop” paintings for which Christensen gained renown, in which he used a spray paint gun to create repeating calligraphic circles, producing a shimmering allover surface effect.

In the decade that followed, Christensen turned more frequently to a freer, less controlled approach, in which he often did not predetermine his compositions. Loosely building layers of paint, wiping it across his canvases, sometimes with window-wiper squeegees, he created images such as Sleepy Hollow (1974), which force the eye to find hints of color and elements of structure within a deceptively darkened surface. From the 1980s to the present, Christensen has been unrelenting in his exploration of new techniques as well as in his return in new ways to forms that had held his attention in the past. In New Harmony (1984), the surface treatment includes an underlayer of melded washes, thick pigment wiped across the surface and scratched into with sticks and brush ends, resulting in a work of barely contained energy. Whereas in Mayan Mist (1986) and Love Attic (1986), Christensen’s palette is strong and vibrant reds and yellows, in Triton (1989), the artist used soft, pale colors sprayed onto the canvas to create a misty effect. He returned in this work, and a number of others similar to it, to the loop form, yet here the blurred circle takes on an evanescent quality, making it seem to metamorphize into an etherealized space before us.

In paintings from the mid-1990s through the present, Christensen conjoins all of the thematic elements he has developed in his art. In 5 or 6 P.M. (1994) melting orbs of color move through a heightened reddish Mars-like atmosphere, in which shifting lines imply movement, evoking the Pythagorian harmony of the spheres. In Rhymewriter #4 (2003) Christensen reiterates his Conjugate of 1967, but the elongated continuous looping lines of the earlier image have been replaced by electrified, overly charged overlapping lines whose looping energy cannot be followed.

Over the course of a career of over forty years, Dan Christensen has exhibited a consistent willingness to change and grow, a quality that underscores the vitality and variety of the art included in this exhibition.