New York City - Spanierman Modern is pleased to announce the opening on February 8, 2011 of Dan Christensen: The Stain Paintings, 1976 to 1988, featuring the vibrant and poetic group of abstract paintings created by Christensen (1942-2007), in which the staining of the canvas played a central role. Encompassing wide-ranging and innovative techniques, these color-soaked paintings, with their skeletal, skittish calligraphic lines and unusual harmonies of shape and tone, exude the artist's pleasure and passion in the act of painting during a particularly joyous time in his life. The exhibition is accompanied by a 32-page catalogue, including color illustrations of the 18 works in the show and an essay by Lisa N. Peters, Ph.D. (available for $30).

The noted critic Clement Greenberg stated in 1990: "Dan Christensen is one of the painters on whom the course of American art depends." Indeed, known as a painter's painter throughout his career, Christensen relentlessly explored unconventional tools and innovative ways of treating pictorial space, expanding the limits, range, and possibilities of paint and form through both systematic and spontaneous methods.

As in his other works, in his stains, Christensen experimented with new pigments and techniques, but instead of the paint thickeners and extenders he had used in his "slabs" of the early 1970s, he turned to recently developed acrylics that could be thinned to the consistency of watercolor washes and combined with a "tension breaker" that enabled the paints to disperse readily, penetrating into the canvas. To create these works, Christensen stapled unstretched canvases to a carpeted floor. He then rolled his paint to produce an overall ground, sometimes laying colors on top of each other to produce desired hues. Then using a stick, brush, or turkey baster, he created the calligraphic "drawing," or framework of a piece. He finished his images by pouring paint around this framework and manipulating it further. The stains straddle the line between the flatness of Color Field painting and the gestural of action of Abstract Expressionism.

The works were a revelation in the context of the art scene in the 1970s. In a day when many artists had either taken the minimal into the purely conceptual or returned to representational forms of image-making, Christensen, as the poet and critic John Ashbery noted in 1979, belonged to the small group of artists who Ashbery felt were "extending the language of modernism in a more traditional and serious way." Ashbery stated that Christensen was "one younger artist who has renewed the tradition [of Color Field painting] honorably." He described Christensen's color as "smoldering and sensuous," and remarked that his works forced the eye to "recognize distinctions among areas of color, which at first have strong family resemblances and only somewhat later turn out to be mavericks who could just as easily be at odds with each other." When a group of Christensen's drawings, similar to his oil stains, were included in a show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1981, the curator John Elderfield observed how Christensen's new work suggested certain organic allusions, which gave the images their distinctive moods, which were often pastoral, "telling of the instinctual, of the fragile as well as lush beauty, and above all of sensual delectation."

Some of Christensen's stains evoke his surroundings on Long Island's East End, where he spent summers with his wife, the sculptor Elaine Grove, and their children. Yet, the paintings are not overtly referential, and their titles are not literal; they were named casually by the artist according to the music to which he was listening in his studio or some quality in a painting that struck his eye.

Born in Cozad, Nebraska, in 1942, the son of a farmer and truck driver, Christensen chose to become an artist when, as a teenager, he saw the work of Jackson Pollock on a trip to Denver. After receiving his B.F.A. from the Kansas City Art Institute, Missouri, in 1964, he moved to New York City, where he participated in a dynamic milieu in the art world of exchange and experimentation. Within two years, he rose to fame as part of a group of young artists who revived painting after a period in which minimalism prevailed. He maintained his dedication to new ways of expanding his artistic expression throughout a career that was sadly cut short-he died suddenly at age 65. Christensen received a National Endowment Grant in 1968 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969. His work has recently received critical and public attention, in an exhibition organized in 2009 by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, held at the Kemper and at the Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2009-2010).

Christensen's paintings are in numerous public collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Seattle Art Museum, and many others.