Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening of Dan Christensen: The Plaid Paintings , presenting a group of geometrically conceived canvases, created from 1969 to 1971 by this leading figure in the Color Field movement. Produced with house-painting rollers and window-washing squeegees, these works capture the spirit of this heady time when artists were at the forefront of the radical transformation taking place in American life. Christensen's "plaids" also demonstrate the dedication he maintained throughout his career to exploring the limitless possibilities of color, paint, and pictorial space. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue that includes an interview with the artist's widow Elaine Grove, who witnessed this period with him, along with color illustrations of the thirteen paintings in the exhibition.

A native of Cozad, Nebraska, Christensen received classical training at the Kansas City Art Institute and was painting the figure when he moved to New York City in the summer of 1965. As Grove notes in the catalogue, Christensen quickly became part of a new group of artists that spent time in each other's studios and gathered at Max's Kansas City, rethinking old rules and making up new ones. As Grove stated, "If Dan was going to be a part of all this . . . it wasn't going to occur by painting the figure in a classical way." After at first creating Minimalist works featuring bars in repeating patterns, Christensen discovered the spray gun, which led to his spray loop and ribbon paintings, described by the New York Times critic Grace Glueck as "lushly radiant." Grove explains that eventually Christensen felt he had explored everything possible with the sprays for the time being: "He could get mists and lines with the spray gun, but it didn't allow him the same type of bravado of the hand that he could get with a paintbrush." In a desire to "get more paint down on the canvas," Christensen turned to the use of window-washing squeegees, a tool traditionally employed in silkscreening, but which he used in a unique way to pull his paint across his canvas surfaces.

Laying un-stretched canvas on a wooden floor covered with carpet in order to absorb the paint, Christensen used rollers and squeegees to roll out large areas of enamel and acrylic. Instead of masking out parts that would have created mechanical stripes, he kept his lines wavy and imprecise, a quality that becomes subtly apparent in observing his deceptively simple canvases in which the geometry is not rigid or overly controlled. Although Christensen would have composition in mind while working, the painting's arrangement would emerge with cropping, the decision-making period that the artist called "the drawing phase." Reflecting the ongoing dialogue in which artists of the time shared and played off of each other's ideas, Christensen's method belonged to the "paint and crop" technique championed by the illustrious critic Clement Greenberg and used also at the time by such artists as Larry Poons and Jules Olitski. The geometric and streamlined quality of Christensen's plaids relate them to Color Field and Minimalist painting, yet the engagement of the artist and the spontaneity of his process reveal the way that the basis for these works was the action painting legacy of Pollock and Abstract Expressionism.

While Christensen's spray-gun paintings have an airier feel by contrast with the plaids, which seem tighter and more solid, a consistency between the works is apparent in the way that the artist continued to explore how paint could interact with paint. He stopped painting the plaids when he felt he had achieved what he had set out to explore and when he began to use the new gels and mediums that were being invented at the time that could thicken and extend paints, producing impasto effects that did not require expensive pigments. However, also created with the use of window-washing squeegees, the white and dark slab paintings emerged from the plaids.

Christensen's plaids belong to a particular moment in his career, but they have also been viewed as having a significance within the era in general. The art historian and Whitney Museum of Art curator James Monte saw them as representing "a very unique contribution to the history of abstraction." Monte stated: "They evolved from the chance procedures of American artists such as Gottlieb, Rothko, and Motherwell. . . . Christensen seemingly reacted against the minimal art of the time with these pictures.  Much of minimal art in the 1960s and 1970s depended on a repetitive dullness in color, structure and layout.  He introduced a freshly conceived approach to geometric configuration, a necessary antidote to that all-consuming dullness."

The first show devoted to the plaids, this exhibition follows the rise of interest in Christensen's art, as awareness has grown of this artist who was a ceaseless explorer and whose career was cut short by his sudden and early death in 2007. The attention to Christensen is manifested in the retrospective exhibition of his work organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, which was held there in the spring and summer of 2009, and will be on view at the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, from October 23, 2009 until January 31, 2010.

View the artist's 2007 exhibition at Spanierman Modern, DAN CHRISTENSEN.