Dan Colen Sculpture at Art Basel Hong Kong Acquired by Private Museum in Malaysia

April 1, 2019

Hong Kong–Lévy Gorvy is proud to announce that the presentation of recent work by Dan Colen at the gallery’s booth at Art Basel Hong Kong 2019 has been sold! The presentation explored universal themes of loss, longing, and change that are central to Colen’s practice.

Most notably, the artist’s sculpture Rabbit and the Moon (2017–18) has been acquired by a private museum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Comprising a life-sized, reclining nude woman who holds aloft a small taxidermied rabbit, Rabbit and the Moon was inspired by the luminous nudes of Renaissance Mannerism and medieval depictions of the Madonna and Child. The artist has stated that the sculpture represents “an all-enveloping kind of femininity—she is a hunter, mother, a lover.”

The sculpture was complemented by paintings from Colen’s Mother series, first begun in 2008. Depicting a whirl of autumn leaves blowing through the bare branches of a tree, each of these canvases replicates scenes from Walt Disney’s famous 1942 animated classic film Bambi. Detached from the film’s recognizable characters and plot, the images capture a natural realm in which decay and transience are part of the cycle of life. Scaled in proportion to the viewer, these works suggest the heroic and existential landscapes championed by the Romantics.