Seidel City

Dan Asher


Dan Asher

Dan Asher, whose career spanned multiple decades and media, was equally talented and difficult to define. His work migrated back and forth between photography, drawing and painting, to sculpture, video, and performance. Similarly, Asher was able to permeate a variety of cultural boundaries. From embedding himself in New York's underground punk and reggae music scene as a photographer in the late 1970s, to penetrating the heart of the art world with his primal drawings and paintings in the 1980s, only to abandon the urban throngs to capture the quietly melting glaciers in Greenland, the violent spectacle of backyard wrestling matches, and many other moments of odd poignancy on the fringes, Asher was an artist whose complexity and unique personal vision do not lend themselves easily to concise catch-all descriptions. His work has been shown extensively, including at Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf, De Appel Foundation in Amsterdam, the De Pont Foundation in Tilburg in the Netherlands, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art.

Short video featuring Dan Asher and others from New York city community commenting on Asher’s work and legacy. Intro to ‘Dan Asher: Near Life Experience’ film.