Dan, Lars (1960- )

(f). 1960, Denmark.
Painter, sculptor, and author
 
Training
1979-84, the Royal Danish Academy of fine arts
Lars Dance approach to art is very personal, almost existential. He acknowledges, however, is not the romantic artist identity, where the art becomes, under divine inspiration, but on the other hand, proclaiming that perseverance and contemplation creates the most beautiful results.
The postmodern era around the 1980s characterized by a showdown with the big stories, a trend which can also be traced in Lars Dan painting. His works express no absolute truths, but on the other hand, portrays a fragmented world, with dialectical stories.

Biography
The Young Wild
Lars Dan begins early to take a serious interest in art. Already as a child he targeted and painter Debuts at the artists ' spring exhibition in 1975, just 15 years old.
Lars Dan dimitterer from the Royal Danish Academy of fine arts in 1982 and enrolls them in an artist community, that same year, nicknamed The Young Savages.
The Young Savages is a group of young painters, who with great media coverage arrives on the Danish art scene with the exhibition the knife upside down on Trane station in Gentofte. Inspired by the Italian trans avant garde and the German group Junge Wilde forming the young painters a Danish counterpart, where Lars Dan and colleagues Peter Bonde, Claus Carstensen, Nina Sten-Knudsen begins to paint on large canvases in a highly expressive and figurative idiom. The motives cover a wide and loaded into the city and the culture of consumption and has many cross references from art history. The young painters is in opposition to the previous period's minimalist and conceptual form language and can be characterized by a return to painting and a more narrative expression.

Lars Dan is at this time one of Denmark's leading painters, who with great virtuosity make his painterly skill. The artist has also created several woodcuts, prints and sculptures and is represented on several leading art museums, in addition to a significant number of group and solo exhibitions.

The painting — history and material
Lars Dan creates half-abstract paintings and moving within a motif world that always portrays the relationship between nature and culture. His motive world stretches from profound faceless people to the landscape scenery and flowers lineups, which in their abstract form awakens reminiscences of 1600-century vanitas paintings. It is poetic narratives that invite to the contemplation of the painting as well as in the mind.
Through many thick layers of dye worker Lars Dan with an ambiguous painting, where visitors of almost archaeological show can explore in its stories. The artist always works on a larger number of screens simultaneously and his paintings are in the pipeline for several years, where the day-by-day added more color, more energy, and as a diary revealing a nesting of time and place.
The thick layer of dye reveals Lars Dance interest for oil malingens quality as a material. The works express a tremendous plasticity, which is supported by often fugitive figuration in an infinite or abstract spaces. Lars Dancing flower paintings appear as a temporal images, which at the same time see the flowers, as they are fresh in space, and as they look when they eventually wither away. It is not therefore a snapshot of a bouquet of flowers, which are the real motive, but rather the remembrance of the flowers and the emotion or story attached to them.

Bouquets to Kristine is the title of Lars Dance solo exhibition in 2005, where he with dedication tells us his own personal love story with his wife Kristine.
Lars Dance paintings appear as a poetic witness of space, light, flowers and the stories, as he remembers them intermittently. The actual story, time and the mind is the real motive.