LOT L9 DAN COLEN / TBT, 2012 M and M's on paper 82 x 60 inches (208.3 x 152.4 cm), framed Auction estimate: $80,000 Gift of the artist and Gagosian Gallery Dan Colen rose to prominence in the 2000's in New York's lower East Side along with Nate Lowman, Ryan McGinley, the late Dash Snow and Aaron Young, among others. He has emerged from this now legendary scene to become one of the most accomplished and promising multimedia neo-pop artists of his generation. Using such common low-culture ephemera as confetti, chewing gum, flowers, trash and candy, Colen creates masterful compositions steeped in the psychology of the familiar, that also allude to the formal compositions of his abstract expressionist predecessors. In using the melting M&Ms as a medium, Colen provokes a collision of joy and sorrow, arousing happy memories and the mourning of the bygone days of childhood. The composition also works as an animated action painting in which the accidental and the random mix poetically with his formal compositional concerns in the "all-over" Jackson Pollock like image that results. Colen has said an artist must have faith in any object he creates. Like Marcel Duchamp and Jeff Koons before him, he embraces the ready-made and the pursuit of capturing the ephemeral and the abstract. PREV   9 OF 49   NEXT