MAISTERRAVALBUENA is pleased to announce the first show in Spain of the British artist Dan Shaw – Town.
For the show in the gallery the artist will present a body of paintings and sculptures which will function in the space as one installation.
Hot rolled steel bars are attached directly to the gallery floor, and in one case to the gallery wall running directly in front of a painting disrupting the viewing plane, and the works on the floor affecting the viewers navigation of the space.
The paintings are made using a heat transfer process. Newsprint is ironed directly onto a prepared aluminum substrate, the painted surface acts as a tool rather than an autonomous medium, it’s physical properties such as the xylene being activated by the heat and transferring the image and text, reversing it into abstraction.
The steel bars with their strong physicality confront the flatness within the aluminum panels on the wall, and enter the discussion around the boundaries between the illusionistic space of painting and the real space of sculpture.
Transferring, it is a process of removing instead of adding. The image it is not above the surface but rather it is fused in the background becoming an abstract representation. This is a constant in Dan Shaw – Town’s work: material and surface become a unity through a manual process.
Dan Shaw– Town (Great Britain, 1983) is an artist based in New York City. A graduate of Goldsmiths, his recent exhibitions include “Jump Cut” At Marianne Boesky gallery; a three-person exhibition with Ned Vena and Davis Rhodes at Bugada Cargnel, Paris. A selection of his drawings was on view as part of “Graphite,” an exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In 2012 the artist participated in a two-person exhibition at Room East with Ben Schumacher, and has previously exhibited at Lisson Gallery, London; Team Gallery, New York; Christopher Crescent, London; and Unosunove, Rome.
