The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by Dan Burkhart opening on Saturday May 19. The current show focuses on new work, but also includes three major older paintings. This show is Burkhart’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery (1993, 1995, 2016, 2018).
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, Burkhart’s paintings are, firstly, exquisite objects, many taking form over years involving 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 work 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 George Caleb Bingham. As these artists informed the development of abstract expressionism, so Burkhart gives new interpretation to a strange and compelling emotional landscape. Burkhart’s also stands beside that of 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 had solo shows with the Rosamund Felsen Gallery in Los Angeles (1981, 1984) and with this gallery in New York (1993, 1994, 2016). Burkhart has appeared in group shows at the Gering & Lopez Gallery (2008), Algus Greenspon (2011), The Box LA (2014) and High Art, Paris (2017). Dan Burkhart has lived in Colorado, Los Angeles, New York and