Dan Asher

Although Dan Asher did not become a full-time artist until his late thirties, his individual identity and work were deeply rooted in the New York avant garde. He originally studied anthropology and sociology and began travelling the world in the 1970s. Along the way, he made videos and photos recording people living on the margins of society: buskers, the blind and the unhoused. He recorded his subjects’ actions without meticulously staging his images or adopting a moralistic stance. In one example, a woman spends minutes fiddling with a plastic bag, unnoticed.

Starting in the early 1990s, he began to create delicate, nearly invisible ballpoint drawings using loose, restless lines and wire-like structures composed of countless tiny dots and strokes that barely indent the paper (see Untitled). Their minimalism defies language; the works are not easy to describe, let alone interpret. Here, the quick action of drawing becomes one with the result, like a thought being captured in writing.

This unmitigated directness characterised the whole of his artistic practice. With one swift action, he kneaded clay or wax into sculptures. He executed monumental neo-expressionist paintings in just ten to fifteen minutes, with no further revisions. Asher had a mild form of autism (then called Asperger’s), which both he and art critics believed played a role in his hyper-concentrated, obsessive way of observing and working.

Later in his oeuvre, the artist made videos and photos of the Icelandic landscape and glaciers. In these works, he explored the prehistoric silence of nature and the intense blue of the ice, driven by a desire for ‘things which have existed for thousands of years and which [...] we tend to forget’. In these works, Asher once again recorded what he saw as objectively as possible, inviting the viewer to join him in his pure and unbiased view of the world.