The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to present a one-person exhibition of books and drawings by Dan Walsh. The show will take place from 8 November through 20 December at 465 West 23rd Street.

Since the early 1990s, Dan Walsh has animated minimalism’s simple vocabulary of squares, lines and grids with vibrant colors and a whimsical, personal hand. Spare and geometric, his work evokes the history of modern abstraction, but his idiosyncratic approach based on the repetition of hand-drawn shapes or lines relinquishes hard-edge angles in favor of a casual, human trace. Progressively integrating color into his pared-down environments, Walsh paints smooth, clearly contoured fields of color on which various shapes are composed: floating squares and rectangles hung from bisecting horizontal lines or huddled together at the corner of the canvas, suggesting weight, volume or pulsing movement.

With his artist books, Walsh offers an intimate, tactile environment for the viewer to engage with his geometries and color fields. Playing on the sequential nature of pages in a book, the artist activates various possibilities for seriality and progression. In one book, concentric rectangles cut out of the paper expose the dimensional properties of the book and its layers. In other works, the paper itself becomes a dynamic participant, rippling with paint or bearing the marks of a letterpress. Poring over these books, the viewer is put in intimate proximity to the tangible, visible, and meditative qualities of Walsh’s work.

Dan Walsh’s artist books and prints were the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Cabinet des Estampes and MAMCO, in Geneva, Switzerland (5/22 – 9/22/02). His work has been exhibited in several national and international venues, including P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Centre d’Art Contemporain la Synagogue de Delme, France; and CCNOA (Art + Architecture) in Brussels, Belgium. He was also included in the 2003 Ljubljiana Biennial, Slovenia, and the 2003 Lyon Biennial of Contemporary Art, France. Dan Walsh was born in Philadelphia in 1960, and lives and works in New York.