Spanning painting, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, Dan Colen’s oeuvre explores the tensions between figuration and abstraction, the abject and the sublime, the timely and the timeless. Colen’s earliest works investigate the forms and characters that populate our collective imagination. Today, he continues to probe cultural mythologies and archetypes in various media, appropriating imagery from animated films, mail-order catalogues, modernist abstraction, and in this case, candy to create an artistic lexicon that insistently collapses the boundaries between high and low.

Courtesy of the artist and Gagosian Gallery, New York

Dan Colen was born 1979 in Leonia, New Jersey. He received a BFA in 2001 from the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence. Recent solo exhibitions include Peanuts, Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2011); In Living Color, FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2012); The Illusion of Life, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (2013); Help!, Brant Foundation Art Study Center, Greenwich, Connecticut (2014); The L . . . o . . . n . . . g Count, Walter De Maria Building, New York (2014); Psychic Slayer, Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Denmark (2015); Shake the Elbow, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (2015); and Oil Painting, Dallas Contemporary (2016). Colen’s work was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial and the 12th Lyon Biennale in 2013. His work is featured in collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens; de la Cruz Collection, Miami; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; Jiménez-Cólón Collection, Puerto Rico; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.