Found in a thrift shop, Dan Colen’s The Awesome Power of Nature is an appropriated painting. Framed backside out, Colen conceals the image and instead exhibits the stretcher, raw canvas, and hanging wire: a blank field of projection upon which the previous owner has written a profound response to the unseen painting. Bringing into question concepts of authorship, authenticity, and creative potential, Colen’s ‘misused’ canvas distils a rarefied elegance from the banal and discarded.
2006
marker on canvas
61 x 48.3 cm