Opening Reception: Thursday, May 30, 6–8 pm
Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present recent drawings by Dan Fischer in the Project Room.
Dan Fischer’s painstaking graphite drawings pay earnest homage to influential modern and contemporary artists. Fischer’s canon of subjects is vast and varied, from a technical innovator and master of materials Jack Whitten to the Father of Conceptual Art, Marcel Duchamp. His process is an exercise in devotional realism: he gathers photocopies from books and journals which he re-creates in pencil with an uncanny mechanical accuracy. Employing a grid to transcribe these images, he calls attention to the specifics of their rendering. Intimately scaled, his images range from straightforward (a serene head shot of Frida Kahlo) to complex (Victor Obsatz’s 1953 double exposure portrait of Duchamp), yet each is treated with the same resolute precision, allowing Fischer to unpack the depth of this history by losing himself in the minutia of the details.
Dan Fischer (b.1977; lives and works in NJ) had a solo retrospective, Dan Fischer: Drawings 1999-2021, at The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY in 2021 followed by a solo exhibition at Alison Jacques in London, UK. His work was featured in Meticulous, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Lifelike at the Walker Art Center and Graphite at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His drawings are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among other institutions. This will be his sixth solo exhibition with the Gallery.