Installation view - photos: Luka Knežević-Strika
Not the best day / A solo exhibition at Ostavinska Galerija, Belgrade, Serbia, June 2017 / Curators: Luka Knežević-Strika and Jelena Mijic
All drawings are named "Untitled", black markers on paper, 21x29.7 cm, 2013-2015
This series of drawings made by Dan Allon between 2013-2015,. They were made first thing in the morning, like an associative writing exercise. The drawings embody Allon’s nightmare and dreams, as fresh, funny, gloomy and grotesque as they appear at the moment he opened his eyes, minutes before forgotten. They portray two years of his life and expose him as a venerable and fragile dreamer, who walked around with that carrier every day.
The title of the exhibition is a frequently used Israeli answer to the question “How are you?”, mostly given when things are bad in the morning. It indicates a moody, depressed and a gloomy ordinary life; It could be worse, but things are certainly not good. Finding a reason for why things are bad is difficult, and it at most times remains obscure. Possibly a failing relationship, a threatening medical issue, a general state of anxiety, debts? When life can always get worse and there is a constant feeling of deteriorating – everything seem like a state of starvation, an emergency, an abyss.
PRESS HERE FOR A RADIO INTERVIEW ABOUT THE EXHIBITION (time: 21:24")
Special thanks: MKM Belgrade, Mariana Zanetti
Day & Knife – Group exhibition, Circle1 Gallery, Berlin, Germany, June-July 2018
Artists: Dan Allon (acrylic on the wall and on the glass, various sizes, 2018, and give away xerox copies, A4, 2018), Olaf Kühnemann, Hugo Mayer, Daniel M Thurau
Curator and text below, by Ofir Dor
Special thanks: Alona Harpaz, Levke Tabbert, Mariana Zanetti
Photos: Levke Tabbert, Inma Moerno
It’s a four men show, on view are their paintings. With the end of painting behind, and towards the end of the world, they are scavenging from the ruins exhausted symbols to set up a tragic / comic theater. Blues and Shadows and Moons inhabit their sets. Their protagonists are the lost, the longing and the wandering, the hunted, the beaten-up and the caged. Mellow in mood and dreamy in temper, their paintings are contemplative and dark, drawn towards a twilight of symbolistic, surrealistic, attentive romanticism.Thurau’s Moons and Suns, Kühnemann’s Seas and Sail-Boats, aren’t they the requisites for a scene?
A Cloud, the Facade of a House, are they not a backdrop? Stems whose veins go back to Gauguin’s Cloisonnism, where contour defines the objects to separate them, like words forming a sentence, elements confronted and coincide in an arena of hybrid painting.
A veil of mystery is pulled over the paintings, an air of tragedy or disaster.
A black mountain (who might have swallowed an elephant) crouches in the horizon, stares back at us from Thurau’s “Bohemian Raphsody”,
A Killer, a man with a Mattock, Woman with a nightgown sits on her bed, desire, crime and punishment in the drawings of Dan Allon. Hugo Mayer paints crime-scenes, the house of a mass-murderer, trees torn to dust under atomic experiment, his Golem/Scarecrow/Astronaut floats in cubist space.
Pornographic close-ups turned to tiles, by repetition Kühnemann makes colorful patterns out of them. Hugo Mayer keeps calm, almost informative, facing the image of horror. Dan Allon’s nightmarish caricatures, drawn point blank at the moment of waking up, then blown-up on the gallery’s walls and window, translate dream material to a functional, graphic descriptions.
The screen, the window, the newspaper. The knife, the scissors, the blues…the Blues!
Cherries – a group exhibition, Hayarkon 19 gallery, Tel Aviv, 2017
Curator: Boaz Arad
Photo: Goni Riskin
Acrylic on the wall, 5.10 x 3.90 meter, 2017