07 oktober 2016

Dan Colen














Dan Colen's studio, Red Hook, Brooklyn, New York, 2014.

"In Red Hook, Brooklyn, in an enormous Civil War-era brick warehouse facing the New York Harbor, is the newest studio of artist Dan Colen. Originally built as storage for mariners coming into and out of the harbor, the buildings now house startups and artists. When the industrial gate of Colen’s studio goes up, light pours in, and the sweet odor of paint and turpentine can be whiffed from the walkway leading to the studio’s door. Enter and you’ll find a scene that captures the last decade or so of Colen’s career, starting from the early 2000s, when the trifecta of Colen, photographer Ryan McGinley, and fellow artist Dash Snow ignited the art world’s interest.
....
Marina Cashdan: Your studio is incredibly active, brimming with works that are either complete or in-process. Is this a particularly active time or do you typically produce work in such a prolific way?

Dan Colen: I do always work on multiple bodies simultaneously, but this is a new studio space, and because of the scale it allows me to work in different ways than I have been able to in my old studios. I can spread out more here, and instead of things piling on top of each other I'm able to devote entire areas to individual projects. It's much nicer like this. I get to watch all the work develop in close proximity, which allows discoveries in one body of work to influence another kind of work. The most significant thing this studio allows me to do is to keep finished pieces around longer, to hang them in a clean space and spend much more time with them.
...." (bron: Artsy, foto's: Alex John Beck)












Dan Colen's Red Hook, Brooklyn studio.

" "At home" is perhaps the best way to describe the air inside Dan Colen's Red Hook, Brooklyn studio, though the American artist might insist on a more active descriptor: at work. Assistants shuffle between tasks as impossibly mundane as they are unassailable. Strike the canvas. Press the stud. Chew the gum. Repeat. Yet here, inside the shell of the pre-Civil War warehouse, I am surrounded on all sides by that difficult beauty Norman Mailer called masculine. A factory, no doubt, but one driven, not led, by the clash between Manichaean and mechanistic urges.

Of course, it’s also really beautiful. Like, people pay top dollar for weddings in the same Liberty Warehouse building-beautiful. Add, on top of that, the fact that many of the works I’m surrounded by will sell for upwards of seven figures, and you begin to understand the size and scope of this, but one of Colen’s New York abodes. No matter what way you cut it, a 12-foot-tall painting requires a 14-foot wall, and to get 16 paintings done at once requires 18 people.
...." (bron: The Creators Project, foto's: Charlie Rubin)

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