Beschreibung:

Dan Colen Untitled 2010 chewing gum on canvas 121.9 x 91.4 cm. (48 x 36 in.) Signed and dated 'Colen 2010' on the stretcher bar.
Provenance Gagosian Gallery, New York Private Collection, New York Catalogue Essay “When I first started, the canvases were very sparse…It slowly developed into a more elaborate and involved process. I started adding a lot more gum to each canvas; I would put pieces down, pick them up again, move ’em around, stretch them out, mush ’em together, and mix favours to create new colours.” - Dan Colen Composed of chewed gum on canvas, Untitled, 2010, perfectly discerns Dan Colen’s clever playfulness with the artist’s unusual medium. Transcending an omnipresent object from everyday life into a pulsating shrine of metropolitan modernity, Colen harnesses the gestural vigour of a performance piece to exhibit his clever ability to shock and engage the viewer. Part of the lively young “Bowery School” scene of the early 2000s, Dan Colen, along with artists Dash Snow Nate Lowman, and Ryan McGinley emerged from the nihilistic urban detritus of Lower East Side, that came to embody an attitude of punk and a ‘90s mix of DIY art. Vivaciously blending the real world with the abstract world, “Gum Painting” distinguishes Colen’s fascinatingly obscure, elaborate and dynamic abstract surface by scattering chewed pieces of Orbit, Trident, Juicy Fruit, and Big Red across the vast surface of a traditional canvas with an explosion of primary colour. In a cunning subversion of trompe l’oeil that embodies the possibilities created in a post-Pop era of modern art, the composition appears to be made of a series of haphazard gestures, reminiscent of the abstract, methodical genius of Jackson Pollock as well as paying homage to the New York master of Pop Art, Andy Warhol his work seemingly conceived as if for mass production. While the present lot is evocative of the Pop Art masters of years past, instead of embarking on an aesthetic exploration of colour and culture as his subjects, Colen chooses to use gum as his subject matter and medium, challenging the conventional boundaries of painting: “I started using the gum like paint. Certain canvases would have gum stretched from the center outward, creating ‘hypnotic’ spirals…But most of the pieces are just about playing with the gum and building up layers until they finish themselves. They turn into a mess but remain beautiful (in my eyes)...I fell in love with them immediately.” (D. Colen, quoted in A. Kellner, ‘Suck On This’, in Vice Magazine, online.) Untitled, simulates a hyper-real clip of the extraordinary, a tableau that deploys gum to ignite illusions of what we would discover if we could shatter the partition of reality and gain access to the magical. While Colen’s gum paintings do remarkably reference abstract expressionist paintings, signifying the triumph of American modernism, they are “action paintings” that are made from chewing gum fully implying an essence of superficiality, casualness and worthlessness. The present lot calls upon a spectrum of art historical predecessors, mass media, and subcultures, permeating the conventional with a seductive new status and communicating a distinctly contemporary interpretation to the linearity of art history. Read More