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Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon
9 November, 2019 - 19 January, 2020
Les Yeux du Monde is honored to present for its final show of 2019, and to kick off 2020, the gallery’s 25th year, Dean Dass: Venus and the Moon. Dass, a well known and beloved professor printmaking at UVa since 1985 who has shown with the gallery since our beginning, is also known worldwide for his artistic innovations and contributions. In the past, he has gained inspiration from the Lapland north of Helsinki. For this show, he traveled north to the wilds of Northern Michigan and Ontario, places where Canada’s famous Group of Seven artists painted over a century ago. If the sublime paintings of the past celebrated vast vistas of nature and discovery (often accompanying colonization) his might focus on a bog or the forgotten riverbank monumentalized. He writes, “Rather than suggesting discovery, my paintings aspire to a kind of quiet and resolve; the view of eternity, to paraphrase the late Mary Oliver.” The resulting paintings are meditative and moving, evocative scenes of the power and mystery of nature minus human interference.
In other monumental oils, such as Fireflies, Dass returns to his collages and prints of 25 years ago which were attuned to video games and sci-fi films. Historical consciousness is always present, whether in his contemplations about what it means to paint landscape today or in his musings on the recurrence of history from Alexander the Great’s days of empire building to our own.
Also included will be some of Dass’s innovative large scale works on paper mounted on panel made with pigments, gold leaf, kaolin and more. In many of these pieces he introduces pink pigments inspired by prehistoric rock formations encountered on his Canadian sojourn. Some are microcosmically attuned to Chub fish in a river spawning golden new worlds or macrocosmically focused on the extraterrestrial—the moon and stars, figures in space.
Dean Dass’s works have been included in numerous exhibitions in museums in Poland, Brazil, England, Finland, the Netherlands, Egypt, as well as in many university and private galleries here and abroad. He has been acknowledged in countless publications and through many fellowships and awards over the years. He has been a guiding light to his students at UVa since 1985 and to the Printmakers Left, a collaborative art making group of colleagues hailing from all parts of our country, with 4 art books now to its name.