DFN Gallery is pleased to present “New Night Paintings” by Dan Witz.  This exhibition includes the range of night motifs Witz has explored in recent years -- bodegas, liquor stores, industrial streets, shrines, homes, and lamps.  Surrounded by darkness, these everyday landmarks are illuminated like theatre stages, creating compelling, self-contained worlds.  Like the lights of a theatre, however, the polarity of light and dark forms a barrier between the viewer and the warmly lit scenes.   

While Dan Witz investigates the subjective characteristics of light, he also probes its visual qualities, particularly the capacity of oil paint to convey luminosity.  To evoke light, Witz first photographs his subject then transfers the digital image to the canvas to use as an underpainting before painting in oil.  According to Witz, “One thing oil paint on canvas can do is make light seem real.”   

That Dan Witz paints lamps is both playful and appropriate.  In Econo Lodge Lamp III, a glowing lamp turns a green hotel room curtain into undulating drapery with theatrical chasms of light and shadow.  Witz shows how warm light has the ability to make the mundane appealing and even sublime.  A shrine-like tableau of liquor bottles lit from below in Witz’s Bar, becomes ethereal and transcendent, like the stain glass window of a cathedral.  Witz draws further back from the light source in Mattituck, Long Island, creating a snow globe world in which a home is idealized and made inaccessible to the viewer.   

Dan Witz was born in Chicago in 1957.  He studied at Rhode Island School of Design and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture before graduating from Cooper Union School of Art in New York in 1980.  Witz has been a National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient, and has twice received fellowships from The New York Foundation for the Arts. His work has been featured in Time, New York, and Juxtapoz, and has been included in many solo and group exhibitions, including “Innocence Found,” “NYC,” and “The Burbs” at DFN Gallery.  Concurrent with this exhibition, Witz will also be showing at Stolen Space in London and Addict Gallerie in Paris.  In September 2008, a monograph of Witz’s work, Dan Witz: In Plain View; Artworks, Illegal and Otherwise from 1978 to the Present, will be published by Gingko Press.

A reception will be held for the artist on
Thursday, April 12th from 6 to 8 PM

To view the entire exhibit click here.