Dan Walsh

Dan Walsh conceived two woodcuts in a square format exploring how form and color relate to each other. The works are complex relief prints based on symmetry, repetition, and alteration. They are made from the same woodblock, that was customized for each print. The first work “Return” juxtaposes seven color blocks ranging from yellow to blue, in different shades of the primary colors, with seven gradients of gray. The fourteen colors are subtly printed from the hand carved wood matrices. Each block features white streaks along the horizontal timber structure. The work continues the artists’ exploration of colors and the ways of seeing. Walsh already has been tackling the theme of 7 Grays extensively since his eponymous show at Paula Cooper Gallery in 2002, reflecting on color theory in an open and experimental approach.

The second print “Reply” bears ten color units ranging on one side from yellow to violet-brown and on the other from light blue to deep green. The mixed colors of the second print have a richer color application. Furthermore, while “Return” plays with the square structure as well as the triangular white space in-between the juxtaposed color blocks, “Reply” rather creates an archaic architectural shape resembling a compound organic triangle. The wooden forms used for both prints play with subtle hand-carved adornments which draw dotted arches starting perpendicularly to each of the wooden block.

The two works seem almost sculptural in their embodiment of ornamental abstraction. The optical illusionism plays here a lesser role than in many of Walsh’s paintings and artists’ books. Nevertheless, the complexity of the small structures and the interplay with the white spaces is to be experienced in the long term – looking again and again. The concentration on the wood patterns and white cutouts delves into questions of repetition and color choice. It is a vigorous study of the phenomenology of color and an exploration of “symbolic structures but also the details, the edges and how they frame things”.

Dan Walsh’s practice involves paintings, drawings, prints and artist books since the early 1990s. His works illustrate the fluidity of motion, straddling between minimalism and geometric abstraction. As minimal and abstract the works may seem, there is always a significant touch of human hand. The shapes and colors are often formed through curved lines and rounded angles. Walsh’s work is not only to be seen within abstract-geometric tradition but absorbs also ornamental Arabian tiles, Peruvian fabrics, oriental carpets, Indonesian stupas and Russian icons.

Dan Walsh’s latest institutional solo exhibitions have been at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2023) and the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2019). His works are in various museum collections such as the MoMA, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago; the Jumex Collection, Mexico City, and the Musée d'art et d’histoire in Geneva.