21 april 2025, Flor Linckens
The controlled freedom of Dan Walsh
Until 17 May, Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam presents the solo exhibition 'Decoys' by Dan Walsh. The American artist is showing a new series of monoprints: a graphic technique in which only a single unique print is made. The works, executed in watercolour on paper, are built layer by layer. The series was developed in collaboration with masters of graphic printing techniques and demonstrates how the artist stretches the boundaries of abstraction without losing his sense of structure and precision.
Walsh once described himself as a ‘maximalist within a minimalist paradigm’, a description that captures the complexity that he manages to extract from the reduced visual vocabulary of Minimalism. His work often begins from strictly defined grids, which he expands and multiplies into complicated systems in a clear, minimalist visual language. In doing so, he explores how colour and space are perceived. Geometric shapes, rhythmic but irregular patterns, and subtle shifts in tone and intensity play a large role in that. At the same time, his work is rooted in reduction and a constant search for the essence.
The practice of Walsh includes paintings, drawings, reliefs and sculptures. For his works, he draws inspiration from cellular forms, Japanese printmaking and other elements from art history, Peruvian textile designs, electrical schematics, diagrams and Tibetan mandalas — without ever explicitly referring to those sources. Walsh plays with perception and structure, with rhythm and repetition. Using transparent layers and subtle colour shifts, he creates an optical space in which the eye can momentarily lose itself. Together, these rhythms, patterns and repeating elementary forms seem to capture a dynamic movement and depth. The word decoys, the title of the series, refers not only to bait, but also to diversionary tactics and misleading illusions that gently lead you astray.
Walsh is known for his consistent, but playful approach to geometric abstraction. His working method is precise and deliberate, but never becomes sterile: lines may deviate, shapes are sometimes formed and rounded by hand, and colour differences arise as a result of layered transparency. He works with a kind of controlled freedom, an imperfect human touch within a fixed system. His works appear clear, systematic and logical, but develop intuitively and organically. Walsh does not work with preconceived sketches: forms, lines and colour layers arise from successive decisions and repetitions. The internal logic of the work becomes clear during that process.
Where some artists consider the painting to be the endpoint, Walsh considers it to be an open system, a place to think, to order and to allow meaning to arise. In that sense, his work is less a statement than an invitation: to look, to look again, and to slowly let yourself be carried away by the internal logic and rhythm of the image.
In addition to his monoprints, Walsh is also presenting a selection of his artist books. It's a medium that has played an important role within his oeuvre for decades. Walsh produces an average of one book per year, not as a form of documentation, but as an autonomous space in which new ideas, rhythms and motifs can emerge. In these books, he explores similar themes, often with a similar visual language, but with a different timbre and weight. In 2002, his books and prints formed the starting point for a solo exhibition in the Cabinet des Estampes du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva.
The exhibition 'Decoys' makes clear how Walsh continues to search for ways to make the process of perception tangible. His work offers no answers, but creates frameworks in which the viewer can wander for a bit.
Dan Walsh was born in Philadelphia in 1960 into a large family. He studied at the Philadelphia College of Art and later obtained his Master's degree from Hunter College in New York. During his studies, he worked briefly as an electrician. In the 1990s, his work was shown in solo exhibitions at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, among others. Since 2003, his work has been regularly shown at Slewe Gallery in Amsterdam: 'Decoys' is his sixth solo at the gallery. In 2014, his work was part of the famous and influential Whitney Biennial, and in 2019, a semi-retrospective of his work was on display at the Bonnefanten museum in Maastricht. His work has also been featured at MoMA PS1 and The New Museum in New York, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva and during the Biennale of Lyon. His work is part of the collections of MoMA in New York, FNAC in Paris, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library and the AKZO Nobel Art Foundation.
