DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

The most talked about and controversial show of the New York City Fall season: Dan Colen’s inaugural solo debut at Gagosian titled Poetry. Walking around Chelsea during the opening weeks of the season, it was hard to turn the other cheek to numerous conversations regarding Colen’s show. There was hype, expectation and tons of dissing.

Colen first appeared on the art radar on the pages of Vice Magazine along with longtime friend and roommate Ryan McGinley. The notorious ‘Dash Snow Crew’ was known for heavy drug use and their ‘hamster nests‘, a private performance where they would shred a bunch of phonebooks, do tons of drugs and act like hamsters. He was then catapulted to artist superstardom with the infamous 2007 New York Magazine article “Chasing Dash Snow”. Dubbed as ‘Warhol’s Children,’ Dash Snow, Ryan McGinley and Dan Colen were celebrated as the embodiment of art, drugs and a rampant ‘fuck you’ attitude. Now Colen has cleaned up his act and is ready for art world glorification (or damnation).

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

Known for his bird shit and gum paintings, Colen’s first formal step into the ‘serious’ art world was in the bathrooms of Gagosian Gallery. Apparently, friend and Gagosian Director San Orlofsky convinced Larry Gagosian to allow him to show his work there and it was quite a financial success. Four years later, Colen has a major show at Gagosian that fills the entire gallery, a risky if not infrequent undertaking. Makes me wonder if it’s an art world fairy tale or a carefully orchestrated publicity stunt.

His show Poetry includes a couple of large-scale ‘candy’ paintings, a ramp, an installation of motorcycles and a propped up brick wall. According to the exhibition’s press release, “drawing from mass media, local environment, and subculture, Colen’s art imbues the ordinary, the disenfranchised, and the tribal with provocative new status.” Actually, skateboarding and bikers are hardly a subculture anymore. These are currently a part of the mainstream and Colen is not the first (nor the last) to use it to inform his work. So what’s with all the hype? Is it the whole mystification of the artist as a rebel/social outcast? Or the reverberating echo left from Snow’s untimely death last year? From ‘bathroom to gallery’ and from art outsider to Gagosian protégé there’s a long stretch, or is there? Regardless, I’m still curious to find out what Colen will come up with next. And I’m sure the art crowd will keep whispering while following his steps.

DAN COLEN: Poetry, Installation view. Photo by Rob McKeever

Dan Colen was born in New Jersey in 1979. He graduated with a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2001. Exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial, New York; “USA Today,” The Royal Academy, London; “Defamation of Character,” PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island, New York; and “Fantastic Politics,” The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo.

Images and artist bio via Gagosian Gallery

Jan Mancuska’s films, installations and stage performances are based on the reception and conception of space. The artist uses linguistic and figurative means to implement a reconfiguration of space, often connected to a fragmentary, dramaturgical, sometimes surreal or existentialistic narrative. A predominant theme in his choreographic concepts is movement; in visual, semantic, architectural and corporeal forms of expression it is articulated – and then dissolved. For his present show in Meyer Riegger gallery the artist created three new pieces, which shift between graphic art, text piece, sculpture, installation and film. Reconstruction, association and disassociation are perceptive techniques that connect and correlate the individual pieces.

In his installation Notion in Progress, Jan Mancuska outlines a description of space. The focal points of the work are the three words Cine, Mato and Graphy which the artist positioned in the room in various media and materials – a free-standing wooden sculpture, a wall projection and a floor graphic. Similar to a mind map, individual associative words branch out from this primary word structure, developing like a chain of terms – in this case physically along wires that span the room diagonally. The installation oscillates between the visibility and the immateriality of thoughts, which condense into fictive, cinematic sequences within the process of contemplating and reading.

The 16 mm film Postcatastrophic Story is presented on three projectors and causes the disassociation of a chronological order to become a constitutive part of the film image as well as the film narrative: The plot revolves around a news report shown from the viewpoint and basically from the memory of five protagonists. The subject is an insignificant catastrophe that occurred in an unspecified town, which one of the protagonists noticed in a newspaper. In the course of the film, which shows each scene looped in delay, the characters as well as the plot threads belonging to the individuals engage in a dialogue with one another.

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In 2006 Oscar Carrasco started to explore Europe, embarking on a disturbing initiation journey through the unusual beauty of decline and abandonment. OFF Limits is the title of a new exhibition on view at Luis Adelantado Valencia that brings together a selection of his latest works which, like a testament of a forgotten and finite metropolis, explores the contemporary ruin, sublimates the strange locations of the not-city, the decomposition of the landscape, the orderly chaos from where everything originates.

A photographic show in which Carrasco grasps the Apollonian forces of architecture, pacifying it with oneiric impulse, confronting them with the forces of entropy and chaos. His gaze is dehumanizing and ethereal, revealing a vocation for the plasticity of space and a purified atmosphere, for a different point of view where the vanishing lines seems to delineate a whole untill the impossible. It’s his dialectic photography-architecture, his disturbing poetics of space.

Among other works, Hotel Kosmos and Inhóspita continues these formal lines, and attentive to the seduction which the colors, the volumes, and the symmetries exercise, we’re transferred to a frontier hotel, recently fallen into bankruptcy or an abandoned sanatorium on the outskirts of Berlin. They are like so many others, big rotten apples on the brink of prosperity and homogenization, a cry out silenced by history, a homage forgotten in the dark.

In his latest work The Last Passenger he takes us to a car cemetery, found in a secluded spot in the Ardennes. In a territory of diaspora, Carrasco seeks the inexorable triumph of a sublime green. The artist becomes the last passenger and he accommodates himself in his inhospitable interiors. He applies his deep and cyclopean gaze, sculpturizing the object which nature devours in its prodigious annihilation.

Educated in the area of digital art and audiovisual postproduction, Carrasco evolves searching new ways to show mortality, the devastating power of the urban masses, the irrevocable return of the organic against the built world. In 2009, he is awarded in the Prizes “Generation” from Caja Madrid and in the “76 Salon de Otoño” from the Spanish Association of Painters and Sculptures. In 2007 he becomes part of the Luis Adelantado Gallery, and since then his work has been shown in Madrid, Shanghai, Rome, México, Puerto Rico, Bogotá, Paris and Brussels, in group shows and art fairs.