Dan Schein “Where Do We Dump The Bodies?”

Mike Weiss Gallery

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Mike Weiss Gallery presents Dan Schein’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery, Where Do We Dump The Bodies? For his first major solo show in New York, the thirty-year-old artist has created a series of darkly humorous paintings in a somber palette and with robust, fervid brushstrokes. Influenced as much by boyish fables, graphic novels, and time spent in densely-wooded areas of Wisconsin, as by the paintings of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Hieronymus Bosch, Schein’s compositions are intimate at the same time that they are vast. The subject matter is redolent – sometimes vaguely medieval, other times faintly biblical – and because of this, we find ourselves searching from painting to painting for a narrative that may never cohere.

Amongst the aesthetic and narrative obscurity, what we do find in every work is the acute sense that we are viewing a pregnant moment – that if there is a story, each painting depicts a major turning point. But we also get the feeling that Schein is poking fun at precisely that – the long- standing obsession in Art to capture an emotionally-charged, historically significant moment. In Man with Lantern for example, stormy skies and shadowy mountains set an awe-inspiring, Romantically Sublime stage. Front and center is a figure of heroic proportions, as tall as the tree beside him. Yet with his gangly frame, cartoonish eyes, and theatrically agape mouth, the man comes across as an antihero, more like a bearded metropolitan hipster in over his head on a hike, rather than a courageous, self-sufficient explorer. In the rest of Schein’s series, however, it is the apathetic state of the figures that is most disconcertingly comical. The characters, all brutish and indifferent, give the works an apocalyptic energy. All logic is left at the door, allowing for anachronistic amalgamations such as a woman in nature on a couch, in a reclined Hellenistic pose, beside a Grecian urn, completely nude except for a turquoise sneaker on her left foot, with a goat at her feet.

The scenes are all, in one way or another, unabashedly absurd, though never silly. Even while they mock Painting’s traditional, self-aggrandizing methods – with excessively thick, bravado-laden brushstrokes and ironically melodramatic figures – there’s an underlying seriousness, an intimate intensity, to Schein’s works. “Why does it have to be so stereotypically a struggle?” the young artist asks rhetorically about painting during a studio visit. An answer, if there is one, seems inherent only to the artworks themselves.

Dan Schein was born in South Africa and now lives and works in New York City. He has had multiple solo shows with Galleri Tom Christoffersen in Copenhagen, Denmark as well as with Galleri Brandstrup in Oslo, Norway. In 2010, the artist won a grant from The National Endowment for the Arts.