Untitled

This large, abstract image celebrates the 13th Annual Community Holiday Festival, 1983 at Lincoln Center.

Best known for imagery that relates to Lyrical Abstraction, Color field painting, and Abstract Expressionism, Dan Christensen (1942 – 2007) was devoted over the course of forty years to exploring the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and pictorial form. He employed methods associated with the action painting techniques of Abstract Expressionism.  The result is a distinctive body of artwork that is original, surprising, and filled with joy, exuberance, and pleasure in the act of painting.

Born in Nebraska, in 1942, the son of a farmer, Christensen chose to become an artist when, as a teenager, he saw the work of Jackson Pollock. After receiving his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute in 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 the art critic Clement 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 participated in major museum shows, including the Whitney Annuals in New York and the Corcoran Gallery’s Biennials, in Washington, D.C.  From the 1970s until his death in 2007 in East Hampton, Dan Christensen was 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. 

Public collections include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 

Note: A framed example from the edition is for reference purposes only. Each impression comes unframed.