Harper’s is pleased to announce Nora, New York-based artist Dan Flanagan’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery. The presentation features new paintings by Flanagan and opens Thursday, June 20, 6–8pm, with a reception attended by the artist.
Across the works that comprise Nora, Flanagan captures the exploratory spirit of the tradition of abstraction. For Flanagan, the aesthetic lineage is about heeding destruction. To abstract an image is to deface and manipulate the source material until it is barely legible. Nora, for example, began with a drawing of a cat. The artist’s relationship with the animal and rendering of its form provoked a journey towards visual and material distortion. With a panoply of media ranging from spray paint to oil paint, and an eclectic assortment of tools, Flanagan maps intricate compositions. As if weathered by abstraction itself, these visually and sensorially dense works conjure the circuitous realm of the subconscious.
Color comes first within Flanagan’s experiential process. The artist works expeditiously, layering copious swaths of striking pigment with brushes, fingers, and miscellaneous objects. Leaning into the hues found in the natural world and sometimes, extending into the artificial realm with brilliant neons, Flanagan’s palette is deeply emotive. A generous smear of cerulean blue recalls the depths of the ocean in Xavier; meanwhile, within the titular work, notes of chilling crimson embody dripping blood. As these diverging tones zip around each canvas, the viewer is ushered into a maze of oscillating moods and temporalities. Slices of white gesso provide moments of pause across these electric scenes. Flanagan uses the invariable medium as a means of punctuation: to add, subtract, and divide compositional space.
In Charles, opaque pigment surrounds a nucleus of enthralling hues, inviting the eye to slow down as it traverses the visual plane. Creams and yellows wash into evening blues at the epicenter of the work, and an array of red, pink, and green tones pepper the orbit of saturated color as if brilliant wildlife camouflaging within the thick of a flourishing jungle. Still, while the white traces the perimeter of the prismatic color field, it is not impenetrable. Yellow peeks out from the edges of the canvas, compromising the opacity with its glimmering light.
Ultimately, across Nora, Flanagan relishes in the hypnotic rhythms of abstraction, seducing the viewer with the poetics of color and the quest for liberatory form. With his visceral application of materials, Flanagan strives toward uninhibited expression—a mode of working that favors process and the cacophony of transformations that process incites. Nora is a culmination of such trial and error. Among these arresting works, the viewer is privy to the rituals of free play and considered demolition that contribute to Flanagan’s infinite world of abstraction.
Dan Flanagan (b. 1983, Madison, WI) studied at the New York Studio School prior to receiving a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute in 2008. Most recently, his work has been exhibited at Spazio Amanita, New York (2024); Secci, Milan (2024); Jupiter Contemporary, Miami (2024); Eighteen, Copenhagen (2023); Harper’s, New York, Los Angeles, and East Hampton (2023, 2022 and 2021); EXPO Chicago, online (2021); Mulherin Toronto, Canada (2019); BBQLA, Los Angeles (2019 and 2017); and Marvin Gardens, Ridgewood, NY (2018). Reviews of his work have appeared in publications including Vanity Fair France, Miami New Times, and Beware! Magazine. Flanagan lives and works in Brooklyn.