Dan ATTOE, Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals
Also on Friday, we celebrate the launch of the sixth issue of our quarterly publication: OCCULT DADDY. Bratwurst will be served.
During GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN, the gallery will be open Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 11 – 6PM
Javier Peres is very pleased to present the second Berlin solo exhibition of Dan ATTOE, “Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals,” featuring new works in painting and mixed media sculpture.
It is no small feat to make a series of landscape paintings that reflect a coherent and specific vision almost 100 years after Ernst Ludwig Kirchner interpreted the aura of his beloved Swiss mountains, but Attoe accomplishes this part of the program with characteristic humility. In “Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals,” Dan Attoe reveals his ritualistic landscapes by taking us along on that most American of past-times: the road trip.
From inside the coals of a ghastly fireside biker ritual to the now-not-so-remote arctic by way of the monolith, New Year’s (rocking eve variety), sexualized angels and ubiquitous roadside motel death scenes, reassuring, paradoxical and sometimes-yes-simple thoughts in good ol’ plain English are there to guide, or to obscure. “Everything is grist for the mill,” the artist admits of his prodigious exterior monologue. There is a sub-lingual quality to Attoe’s work that Burroughs would appreciate.
Dan Attoe’s truck once broke down just as he was pulling into the parking lot at Devil’s Tower. The artist lives and works in Washington and will be present for the opening. His first solo exhibition in a European institution, “American Dreams,” opens at MUSAC in Leon, Spain, will be on view from May 17 ˆ July 6, 2008.