Lisa N. Peters
When we were helping the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, in organizing the retrospective of the work of Dan Christensen that opened there last May, it emerged that a group of paintings Christensen created from 1969 to 1971 stood out and were different, or so it seemed. . . .These large (many wall-size) geometrically conceived canvases with discreet flat areas of color, appeared a departure in Christensen’s oeuvre from the freeform spray gun works that preceded them as well as from his later work, in which he pushed automatist methods with the spray gun to their limits in blurred circles, infinite lozenges, swirling ribbons, and rich drizzle marks that seem to ricochet off the surface. The paintings with their clean horizontal and vertical stripes drew the attention of everyone who saw them, maybe because instead of having the stillness of so much hard-edged geometric painting, they seemed to project a glowing energy.
