Cleveland’s Dan Oldfather is a self-taught painter without the usual art school credentials. But she’s already won awards, shown in prestige venues such as moCa Cleveland and Bonfoey Gallery, as well as galleries in New York, Chicago and Detroit, and even got some ink in The New York Times for her colorful, motion-filled abstractions created from oil, acrylics, spray paint and ink.
Now Abattoir Gallery, where she had a show in 2023 called Violet Hour, is presenting its second solo show with her, titled De Novo. She’s moved away from abstraction to landscapes still imbued by an abstract quality that makes them mysterious, elusive, and, to use the gallery’s description, “otherworldy.”
“I communicate the dilemma of being through landscape,” the artist says. “I bring my insides to bear on the outside and trepidation colors the scene. Broodingly, the atmosphere is thick, and the landscape psychedelically tinted like dawn, an eclipse, or a summer storm. Flora glows and becomes bulbous and fleshy, petal-like and feathery in the waning light. Reality is more than it seems. One follows the receding landscape out and away only to wash up again at the shores of one’s skin; hope; longing; loss. While building other worlds, the sense of my impermanence in an expansive, mysterious universe stretches out into broader context and I am free.”
The show opens with a reception on Friday March 14 and will be on view through April 18.
abattoirgallery/15-dana-oldfather-de-novo/works/
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