Dan Schein: My Life is Small

The exhibition consists of 16 paintings, all made during the Covid-19 lockdown. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why there is a clear predominance of interiors filled with evil cats, naked women, dancers and a nose-picking daydreamer.

As always, there is a lot going on in Dan Schein’s narrative, coloristic and humorous universe, and with his well-known expressive and violent brushwork, Schein’s work engages you in conversation. They seem both personal and universal, bold and brave while equally fragile and wry in the choice of motifs – he opens the floodgates of imagination and welcomes a world of absurdities and banalities.

In Schein’s artistic work, there are clear references to “Bad” Painting” – a concept introduced by the curator Marcia Tucker in 1978 in connection with an exhibition of the same name, which was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, New York – seven years before Dan Schein was born. Tucker’s use of the word “bad” was never used to denote the artists or their work but was rather used ironically to elevate it from, or ignore, the common structures and ideas of what “good” art of time was.