The Maria Leuff Foundation is pleased to present Disney Paintings, an exhibition by Dan Colen.

​

The exhibition brings together a selection of never before exhibited paintings (2011 - 2025),

spanning the breadth of Colen’s twenty-year engagement with the series. The works position

background as primary subject, inverting the expectations and utility of figurative painting while

navigating the liminal space between narrative, realism, and abstraction. Here, the landscape

itself emerges as the central character.

 

By excluding the iconic heroes of fairy tales and foregrounding the scenic backgrounds, the

works enact an inversion in which non-place emerges as protagonist. This gesture suggests that

the acceleration of accessibility ultimately destabilizes the image itself, shifting away from

corporate identity toward a form of atmospheric opacity.

 

Nature returns as a site of wonder through the concept of utopia as both “no place” and an

unattainable ideal. This inquiry into idealism extends beyond the paintings through Sky

HighFarm, a non profit organization founded by Dan Colen in 2012 a few miles from The Maria

Leuff Foundation, where regenerative agriculture, farming, and community-driven food

sovereignty converge as both social and ecological practice.

 

Dan Colen was born in New Jersey in 1979 and lives and works in New York. His work has been

featured in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Royal Academy

of Arts, London; MoMA PS1, New York; the New Museum, New York; the Buffalo AKG Art

Museum, Buffalo; the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; the Brant Foundation Art Study Center,

Greenwich; the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo, Bergamo; and the

Herning Museum of Contemporary Art, Herning, Denmark.