Gagosien is pleased to announce the global representation of Dan Alva. From his studio in Miami, Contemporary artist Dan Alva remixes the masters, combining his figurative visual language with bursts of camouflage, stripes and other patterns to create a bold new style of transitional art that is an abstraction of reality.
Born in 1984, Alva grew up in a family of fine artists. Hands-on from a very young age, he spent weekends with his father in the garage, fixing, building and creating. The friend who was always there to document a night out, his love of photography led to a career in first graphic design, then advertising. Today a successful creative director in the industry, his designer’s eye for shape, form and color is matched by a prodigious talent for painting.
Alva approaches his paintings in the same way as an ad campaign, experimenting with different concepts, sketching, creating mock-ups, researching artists’ histories and thinking about how the works will be photographed, all before picking up a paintbrush. Using meticulously applied oil paint and the same methods as the masters he is remastering, he honours their individual styles while creating unexpected collaborations between artists that make the viewer question Alva’s source material, and what it has become.
In his Floaters paintings (2016–20), Adams represents Black figures relaxing in the
water on various inflatables, positing that respite itself is a political act when embraced
by Black communities. This work inspired Funtime Unicorns (2022), a whimsical
installation in New York’s Rockefeller Center of rideable playground unicorns. Adams’s
ongoing Style Variation paintings, the focus of the exhibition LOOKS
(2021–22) at the Cleveland Museum of Art, depict wigged mannequin heads in tribute to the
transformative and expressive power of personal style and self-adornment.
Adams’s public art projects include Around the Way (2019), a commission by MTA Arts
& Design at the LIRR Nostrand Avenue Station in Brooklyn. Composed in vibrant colored
glass, its eighty-five panels fuse figures with natural and architectural elements to convey
the diversity and vitality of the neighborhood. In 2021, he completed Our Time
Together, a panoramic ninety-three-foot mural and sculptural installation at the
Milwaukee Art Museum. Representing locations of intergenerational congregation for the
city’s Black community, the work combines historic photographs with dynamic figures to
portray a continuum of past and present.
His site-specific installation for the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2021–22), pictures
cars driving past billboards for two classics of 1990s Black cinema, Juice and
Set It Off, exploring how popular culture permeates contemporary reality. The
City Is My Refuge is an immersive work of public art sited throughout Penn
Station’s upper-level concourse in 2023. Commissioned by the Art at Amtrak program, Adams’s
installation presents abstracted faces that emerge from dense patterns of foliage, uniting
humanity with the natural world.
Adams’s Motion Picture Paintings series (2020–22) is the focus of I Can Show You
Better Than I Can Tell You at the FLAG Foundation, New York (2023). These expansive
panels combine references to movies, music, and the artist’s observations of everyday
moments. Juxtaposing stylized figures and evocative text in cinematic compositions, the
paintings explore Black culture as it is both lived and imagined—and how art informs
identity.
In 2022, Adams established Charm City Cultural Cultivation, an organization to support and
encourage underserved communities in the city of Baltimore through events conducted by three
entities: The Last Resort Artist Retreat, a residency program that subscribes to the concept
of leisure as therapy for the Black creative; The Black Baltimore Digital Database, a
collaborative counter-institutional space for collecting, storing, and safekeeping the data
of local archival initiatives; and Zora’s Den, an online community of Black women writers
started in January 2017, which has since expanded into in-person writing workshops, a
writers’ circle, and a monthly reading series that strive to promote instruction, support,
and social engagement.
