Dan Burkhart
May 21 – July 31, 2016
The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Dan Burkhart opening on Saturday May 21. The current show, focusing on new work and including two major early paintings, is Burkhart’s third solo show with the gallery and his first one-person exhibition in New York in 22 years. A reception for the artist will be held on the day of the opening from 6 to 8pm.
Dan Burkhart’s art is an extensive body of contemporary work that is not widely known. Ranging from complex visionary compositions to disquieting corporeal abstractions, his paintings are, firstly, exquisite objects, many taking form over years through inexorable experimentation with medium, technique and effect.
Although the artist showed with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles in the 1980s (where gallery mates included Richard Jackson, Mike Kelley and Chris Burden) and received significant press and collector interest (works are in the collection of Eli Broad), after moving to New York Burkhart’s independence and rigor confounded art world context. His painting comes out of the literary Anti-Transcendentalist context of American romantic and symbolist art that has received illumination by painters as diverse as John Quidor, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Darrel Austin, Ivan Albright and interestingly, the Luminist George Caleb Bingham. And as these artists informed the development of abstract expressionism, so Burkhart gives new interpretation to a strange and compelling emotional landscape. The artist’s work also stands beside that of odd and independent contemporary artists like Glenn Brown, David Altmejd and Daniel Hesidence.
Dan Burkhart was born in Fargo, North Dakota in 1952 and received his MFA from the University of Colorado. He has shown with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles (1981, 1984) and with this gallery in New York (1993, 1994). The artist has appeared in group shows at the Gering & Lopez Gallery (2008), Algus Greenspon (2011) and The Box LA (2014). Dan Burkhart has lived in Colorado, Los Angeles, New York and Albuquerque, New Mexico. Dan Burkhart currently lives and works in Moravia, New York.