Dan Witz: Mosh Pits, Raves and One Small Orgy

Dan Witz’s third solo exhibition at Jonathan LeVine Gallery opens on Saturday 2 April 2016 at the gallery’s space at 529 West 20th Street in Chelsea and runs to 30 April. The title sets out the programme plainly: Mosh Pits, Raves and One Small Orgy. For most of the previous decade Witz had been painting the crush at hardcore gigs with the finish of a seventeenth-century master. The new show keeps that subject and pushes it towards other kinds of crowd.

Thirty years on the street and in the studio

Witz, born in Chicago in 1957 and based in Brooklyn, has a fair claim to be one of the people who started what is now called street art. He came to New York in the late 1970s to study, first at the Rhode Island School of Design and then at Cooper Union, where he took his degree in 1980. In 1979 he began painting small, lifelike hummingbirds on walls and doors below 14th Street, more than forty of them, each worked up in acrylic with tiny brushes over about two hours. By his own account, police and building supers who caught him at it usually let him finish once they saw what he was painting. The project is documented on the artist’s page for the 1979 birds.

The street work that followed was darker. In the 1980s came poems in metal letters set into the asphalt. Around 1994 he started the Hoodys, shadowy hooded figures pasted up across Manhattan and Brooklyn at a time when downtown was weighed down by drugs, crime and HIV and the scene that had made him was being priced out. Later came small illusionistic windows set behind real grates, glimpses of disturbing scenes that people walked past without a second look. Gingko Press gathered three decades of this into the monograph In Plain View in 2010.

Alongside that, Witz built a studio practice with a very different pace. He has held a National Endowment for the Arts grant and two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, and his work is in the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. He combines digital tools with the techniques of the old masters, and the results are large oils whose light and detail are close enough to photographic to fool the eye at a distance.

The pit as history painting

The mosh pit series draws on Witz’s own long involvement in the city’s music scene. He has described himself as an academic realist who happens to live in the present, which means no Roman legions or Gothic set pieces. For a painter trained in that tradition, he argues, the grandest ambition is the large figure group, and the hardcore crowd gives him one: bodies piled into each other, straining, falling and being caught.

The comparison he invites is with Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, painters of seething crowds in which every figure is doing something particular. The new paintings keep that density. Scrum 1 (King of Hearts) and Scrum 2 (All Out War) continued the core series; Sick of It All, which shares its name with a New York hardcore band, stretched to about 49 by 77 inches.

Brighter rooms

The change came in the new settings. Two paintings called Brite Nite moved the crowd from a sweaty hardcore floor to a rave, and the mood shifted with the lighting. The bodies in them are still packed together, but the push and shove give way to something closer to euphoria, with less of the violence that runs through the mosh pits.

Small Orgy went further. A modest canvas of about 21 by 37 inches, it knots a group of nude figures together, each caught at a different moment of pleasure, so that the eye struggles to separate one body from the next. It reads as a quieter answer to the pits: the same pile of limbs, with the aggression drained out.

What connects the three subjects is how Witz handles light, shadow, movement and depth. The trompe l’oeil skill that made his street windows convincing is the same one that makes a canvas of a crowd feel as though it might spill forward. Whether the subject is a circle pit, a rave floor or a heap of lovers, he is painting the moment when individuals give in to the group and to something older than manners.

The gallery’s press release for the exhibition lists the works and the artist’s full biography.