Dan Colen

Dan Colen was born in 1979 in Leonia, New Jersey. He earned a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. In 2006, his first major solo show, Potty Mouth Potty War, was installed in the restrooms of Gagosian Gallery in New York and sold out quickly, establishing him as a rising figure in the city's contemporary art scene. That same year he was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Colen's paintings have used materials including chewing gum, motor oil, tar, and flowers, and have ranged from densely worked abstractions to large text-based paintings, including a body of work known informally as the Holy Shit paintings. He has described his practice as working the line between the abstract and the pictorial, using unconventional materials to create images that read as both. His solo exhibitions have appeared at institutions including the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo (2011), the FLAG Art Foundation in New York (2012), the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut (2014), Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo (2015), HEART Herning Museum of Contemporary Art in Denmark (2015), Dallas Contemporary (2016), and Newport Street Gallery in London (2017).

In 2011, Colen founded Sky High Farm in the Hudson Valley, New York, a working farm that became a nonprofit organization in 2016 focused on addressing food insecurity, and that has since grown to include an exhibition and biennial program. He continues to exhibit internationally and lives and works in New York.

Colen's early career was defined by rapid market attention: his 2006 restroom show at Gagosian sold out immediately, and his inclusion in the Whitney Biennial that same year placed him within a major institutional survey of contemporary art early in his career. Museum acquisitions followed, including the Whitney Museum, the Hirshhorn, MOCA Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center, and European institutions such as the Astrup Fearnley Museet and Moderna Museet. In more recent coverage, attention has increasingly shifted toward his work at Sky High Farm, with profiles describing it as an extension of his art practice into food access and land use. No verbatim, attributable critical assessment of his work from a named critic at a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile, so none is quoted here.

Public reporting on Dan Colen's auction market points to two different pictures. Aggregate market databases such as MutualArt and Artsy cite a reported high of about USD 3.1 million for a painting, but neither the underlying work's title, the auction house, nor the exact sale date is disclosed in the publicly available summaries, so this figure should be read as a market-database aggregate rather than a verified single-lot record. The most fully documented individual sale is Holy Shit, a text-based painting from 2004 to 2006, which sold for USD 341,000 at Sotheby's in New York on 13 November 2013. The same painting later resold for USD 12,700 at Christie's; Artnet News reported the sale took place on a September 30, but did not specify the year, and highlighted the decline as notable given that his paintings have reached the seven-figure range elsewhere. He is currently represented by Gagosian and MASSIMODECARLO.

Colen's market has shown real volatility, most visibly in the wide gap between the 2013 price and the later, much lower resale price for the same painting, and the widely cited "USD 3.1 million" auction high circulating in market databases cannot currently be tied to a specific, verifiable lot. There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne, which puts added weight on provenance and on verification through his current galleries, Gagosian and MASSIMODECARLO. Collectors should treat aggregate market figures for this artist with caution and look for house-specific, dated sale records before relying on any single headline number.