Renowned and celebrated in The Netherlands since the sixties Daan van Golden presented his first solo exhibition in the UK at Camden Art Centre
This exhibition bought together over thirty of his paintings from the 1960’s to the present alongside a number of photographs including a selection from the series Youth is an art, images van Golden took of his daughter as she was growing up from 1978 to 1996.
In his paintings, photographs and prints van Golden appropriates images discovered in the world around him. His art is made up of both his own fascinations and out of the ordinary moments that occur in his life. Through the work he finds beauty in the ordinary and the everyday and treats mundane objects with integrity and respect by showing us familiar things in a new way.
After becoming interested in meditation and Zen philosophy during time spent in Japan, he slowed down his painting technique producing work in a meditative, thoughtful and deliberate way. Using tea towels, decorative wallpaper and fabric as subjects he painstakingly reproduced their patterns with enamel paint. Later on he began to source imagery from the history of art after discovering strange, wonderful and new bodies within paintings by Pollock and Matisse.
His slow rhythm of production means he often only produces three to four canvases a year and subsequently has not met with the same recognition as contemporaries such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. His work however has an enduring appeal both to art critics and a younger generation of Dutch artists.
The exhibition was curated by Anne Pontégnie and organised by Camden Arts Centre in collaboration with MAMCO, Geneva and Culturgest, Lisbon.
The exhibition was accompanied by a full colour catalogue including images of the works in the exhibition and texts by Anne Pontégnie and Luke Smythe.
