Daniel Dove: Frolic

Philip Marin Gallery is proud to present, “Frolic,” an exhibition of new oil-on-canvas paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Dove. Dove's highly-rendered, surreal landscapes explore painting and the paradoxes of modern life.

Daniel Dove's paintings envision solitary moments of contemplation and repose. They offer clarity and concealment: glimpsed figures and oblique messages, crisply illuminated. His beautiful, labor-intensive brushwork is rich with detail. The visual planes in Daniel Dove's work fall back in space, match our pace of looking and mirror our gaze as if energized by the power of our observation.

An immigrant's child, Daniel Dove grew up in a household without art books that did not locate vision in the European art-historical canon. Dove was supposed to major in chemistry, not art. He ended up in painting, drawn to the craft and detail the medium allows. Painting has a unique ability, through the hand-mixing of colored pigments, to record the artists's “impression" - the perception of light and space rendered in physical material. The material aspect of Dove’s work is pushed with his brushes and an array of tools that drag paint across the canvas. They stress the flatness of the picture plane as a counterpoint to painterly depth.

Living in Austin, Daniel Dove experienced a rapidly expanding urban landscape that seemed to grow in all directions. In contrast, elsewhere in the US, Dove saw cities that boomed in the pre- and post-war years, only to slide through the 1980s, entropically folding in on themselves. One particular fascination for Dove in these places was monumental public sculpture, placed by well-meaning civic organizations or corporations, graffitied and standing lonely in the landscape, like something out the work of Yves Tanguy, as if enacted by Caspar David Friedrich. At the same time, these areas for Dove enacted cyclical patterns, new beginnings and new possibilities for human experience. 

Daniel Dove (b. 1971, Austin, TX) received his BFA from the University of Texas at Austin (Austin, TX) and his MFA from Yale University (New Haven, CT). Dove’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Cherry and Martin (Los Angeles, CA), Frederick R. Weisman Museum (Malibu, CA), Cleveland Institute of Art (Cleveland, OH), The Contemporary Austin (Austin, TX), and Jack Shainman Gallery (New York, NY). He has received grants from the Dallas Museum of Art and the Ohio Arts Council. Daniel Dove is the recipient of The William and Dorothy Yeck Award and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. He has been featured in various publications such as “Artforum,” “Art in America,” “Los Angeles Times,” “The Village Voice,” “Harper’s Magazine,” “LA Weekly,” and “Tema Celeste.” Daniel Dove’s work is in the permanent collections of the Frederick R. Weisman Museum (Malibu, CA), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland, OH), and Hallmark Art Collection (Kansas City, MO). Daniel Dove is a full-time faculty member at California State University, Long Beach. Dove lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.