71.12 x 50.8 cm
For his first solo exhibition at moniquemeloche, Dan Gunn (American, born 1980, lives Chicago), who considers himself primarily a painter, will make all new work including wall-based work, sculpture and hanging elements. Simultaneously present and elusive, Gunn’s work elicits an awareness of the viewer’s own visual and spatial perception through the construction of objects that highlight the interconnected relationship between artist, viewer, artwork and the history of abstract images. Using the many languages of abstraction, such as patterns, lines, dots, and drips, Gunn builds a series of malleable surfaces that display different functional, aesthetic and cultural relationships between their constituent parts. However, for Gunn, abstraction is not used to reveal some underlying truth but rather as a way to notice the everyday structures that influence our relationship with pictures. Among other things, Gunn’s work examines our curious relationship to commercial display. His highly-crafted works combine everyday materials (found fabrics, tinsel, glitter, light, etc.) to emulate enticing devices of presentation (shop windows, stage sets, billboards, architecture, furniture, etc.) alongside more traditional painterly techniques that complicates easy categorization. His shifting materials alternately use transparency and opacity, solidity and screening. Perforated layers reveal obscured surfaces. Surfaces echo other surfaces. Structures recall other structures. A formal kinship of both surface and structure give unity to the whole, while balance and opposition create tension. With an emphasis on the primacy of embodied experience, Gunn’s installation aims to be simultaneously seductive, quirky, and even sublime.
