Dan Schein

Middle Aged

21.2 - 22.3.2025

Tom Christoffersen Gallery is pleased to present Middle Aged, an exhibition of new paintings by New York-based artist Dan Schein. Full of sardonic humor, these new canvases are borne from a stew of influences and references that is very much Schein’s own. Influences range from medieval and early renaissance art to the Lord of the Rings; adult magazines; female bodies – glorified on social media’s more bizarre reaches – that have been surgically forged into cartoonishly proportions, as well as contemporary anxiety (personal and societal) about the malevolent forces currently reshaping political landscapes.

The show’s title is a wry dual reference to both midlife – that period of adulthood sandwiched between youth and old age that’s so associated with physical and psychological change, along with an increasing awareness of one’s own mortality – and the art historical period that has exerted such a potent influence on this recent body of work. The artist has a particular fascination with the medieval era’s illuminated manuscripts – highly ornate, handwritten and illustrated books, written in flourishing script and featuring richly colored illustrations. While they are often celebrated for their lavish beauty and the skill involved in their creation, their appeal to Schein is far more idiosyncratic. He is more impressed by the figures’ cadaver-esque faces with their uniformly blank expressions and exaggerated eyelids, their bizarre depictions of myths, religious stories, and everyday life, as well as the clumsy theatricality engendered by scenes painted before the development of perspective drawing in the mid 15th century. He looks to the past for inspiration not because he idealises it, but because it opens up far more space for his imagination, for the creation of his absurd yet profound scenes.

Medieval towers – populated by a peculiar cast – are an especially recurring motif: a woman with pendulous breasts gazes beatifically from a crenelated citadel; a beady-eyed character wields a knife while holding a severed head, both of them framed by a Romanesque window, or a gaudy monarch who seems to be wringing a dripping cloth from the top of a gothic belfry. 

Schein’s creative process has fundamentally shifted in the last few years. Whereas he previously relied on a number of pre-sketches before starting work on a canvas, he has recently taken a far more intuitive, less controlled approach that allows the process of painting to dictate each final image. As he himself approaches middle age, the artist is confident enough to risk more, to honor his own instincts and feel confident that his signature frustration and anxieties are so built into his process as to be palpable in the paintings themselves.

Dan Schein was born in South Africa in 1985, and now lives and works in New York City. This is his fifth solo show with the gallery. He has shown widely across Europe and in the US; his next solo show is at JJ Murphy Gallery, New York City, in April 2025.