Abstract Paintings

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Among America’s leading abstract artists, Dan Christensen (1942-2007) was devoted over the course of forty years to exploring the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and pictor...

Dan Christensen Untitled, circa 1970-71 Acrylic and enamel on canvas 44 x 20 inches Provenance: The artist Sherron Francis (gift from the above) Dan Christensen was an American abs...

Signed and dated "© D. Christensen 1989" with an orientation arrow verso. Medium "Acrylic on Canvas", title "Java", size "22 x 20" are all inscribed verso. Dimensions of this artwo...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is recognized as a leader in American experimental abstraction. After completing his BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1964, he moved to New York C...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost abstract artist. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expanding the constantly shifting aesthetics of 20th century abstraction. Christensen established his reputation at the end of the 1960s, by using spray guns to create colorful stacks, loops, and lines in his artworks. This body of work was considered by the legendary art critic Clement Greenberg among the most original abstract paintings of the decade. Unlike many of his contemporaries who dedicated themselves to a signature style, Christensen was unrelentingly curious and allowed his dynamic version of abstraction to evolve as he tried new techniques and varied his aesthetic. During the 1980's in particular, Christensen focused on experimenting with different forms of washing, spraying, and layering colours over top of each other. The works from Christensen's late period combine the gestural drama of Abstract Expressionism with the stained surface look popularized by the color field artists. The aesthetic complexity he achieved with these combined techniques are perfectly demonstrated in this later untitled work (aka "Indian Summer...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost abstract artists. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expanding...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. Over the course of forty years as an artist, Christensen was devoted to exploring...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost abstract artists. Over the course of his career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expanding the ...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expa...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expa...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expa...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) is widely recognized as one of America’s foremost color abstractionists. Over the course his lengthy career, Christensen was devoted to exploring and expa...

Signed & dated Verso. 1965 Paul Reed in 1970. He favored “staining” untreated canvas. Paul Reed, the last surviving member of the Washington Color School, who explored the complexities of color and form in vibrant bio-morphic and hard-edge abstract paintings, died on Sept. 26 at his home in Phoenix. He was 96. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Jean Reed Roberts. Mr. Reed acquired his public identity as an artist when he was included, along with Gene Davis, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, Thomas Downing and Howard Mehring, in “The Washington Color Painters,” a landmark traveling exhibition that began at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art in 1965. All of the other painters had been shown, the year before, in “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” a 31-artist exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art organized by the critic Clement Greenberg in an effort to write a new chapter in the historic march of abstract art. Like his fellow Washington artists, Mr. Reed rejected the hot, gestural approach of Abstract Expressionism and explored color and abstract forms in a cooler mode. Working with diluted acrylic paint, in discrete series that methodically explored formal issues, he created luminous fields of color by letting the paint bleed into, or stain, untreated canvas. “I have a saying: Pollock dripped, Frankenthaler poured,” he told The Washington Post in 2011, referring to the artist Helen Frankenthaler. “Morris Louis poured. Howard Mehring sprinkled. I blot.” In his first stained series, “Mandala,” color radiated from a circular central image. The nearly 100 paintings in his “Disk” series, which he called “a matrix for exploiting color,” consisted of a central circle and two triangles positioned at the corners of the canvas. Over the next decade he moved to hard-edge geometric zigzags and stripes in the vertical “Upstart” series, color grids and shaped canvases that allowed for more complex experiments in form and color relations. He also made welded steel sculptures and, in the “Quad” series of the 1980s, collaged photographs. “Reed was, in a sense, the ‘little master’ of that first batch of Washington colorists,” the critic Benjamin Forgey wrote in The Washington Post in 1997. “He was a latecomer — he didn’t turn seriously to painting until he was in his mid-30s — but he never considered becoming anything other than an abstract painter. And when he was ready to show, in his early 40s, he was a very good abstract painter indeed.” Mr. Reed gave himself a more modest assessment in an interview with NPR last year. “I’m sort of low man on the totem pole of that group of six,” he said. Paul Allen...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Following the dominant Abstract Expressionist wave of post-WWII, which decried realism in favor of non-representational forms, the second-generation Abstract Expressionists pointed t...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

From the Target Series

A leading abstract painter in his lifetime, Dan Christensen drew from a range of Modernist sources to produce colorful, luminous compositions that featured giant dots, whirling loops...

Acrylic on Canvas