Dan Christensen

Dan Christensen (1942-2007) was an American abstract painter whose long and inventive career carried him through several major phases of postwar American painting, from Color Field abstraction to Lyrical Abstraction and beyond. Born in Cozad, Nebraska, he studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before moving to New York in 1965, arriving at a moment when the New York School was rapidly transforming and the possibilities of abstract painting were being renegotiated by a new generation of artists.

Christensen came to prominence in the late 1960s with his signature spray-gun paintings, in which he used industrial spray equipment to lay down looping, ribbon-like passages of color across large-scale canvases. These works, which combined a certain minimalist restraint with a warm painterly sensibility, established him as one of the most inventive young painters of his generation. His practice was championed early by the critic Clement Greenberg, who included him in important exhibitions of Color Field painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction, and by the influential dealer André Emmerich, who represented Christensen through many of his most productive years.

Over the following decades, Christensen continually reinvented his practice, moving from the sprayed loop paintings into gestural stain works, thick impasto passages, calligraphic marks, and other approaches to abstraction, all unified by a sustained commitment to color and to the expressive possibilities of the painted surface. He worked from studios in New York and East Hampton and remained productive until the end of his life. His paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim, the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, and other major American institutions, and his work continues to be reassessed as one of the significant bodies of postwar American abstract painting.

“Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends.” - Clement Greenberg