Scrum 2 (All Out War) By Dan Witz (All Photos By Gail)
This past week, when a friend or coworker would ask me what I did over the weekend, or if I’d seen any good art lately, I felt like I had to qualify my response by first asking, “Well, do you know what a Mosh Pit is?” And usually that person would say that they did, or at least that they had some idea. The reason I had to ask was to put in context the exhibit I had just seen at the Jonathan Levine Gallery by contemporary hyper–realist painter Dan Witz, who is all about the mosh pit action. Nobody paints a pit like Dan Witz.
Artist and Former Musician Dan Witz, whom I’m just going to go ahead and label the Norman Rockwell of Hardcore, is back at Jonathan LeVine Gallery with an outstanding collection of his hyper-realist style paintings and portraits of Hardcore music fans captured in their natural habitat: The Pit. NY Hardcore is Witz’ second solo exhibit at LeVine, following Mosh Pits, Human and Otherwise in July of 2011. The current show features select paintings previously exhibited in 2011.
It’s hard to believe that these are paintings and not photographs. They look so real, I can almost smell them.
I like this one a lot.
Artist Dan Witz at the opening reception chatting with fans. He is very nice.
NY Hardcore includes both crowd scenes – captured from various vantage points – and individual portraits.
Everybody knows this dude, right? I think I used to see him at the Fleetwood (Redondo Beach, CA) back in the early ’80s.
I’m pretty sure that this guy is meant to be gallery owner Jonathan LeVine.
Dan Witz: NY Hardcore runs through May 3rd, 2014 at the Jonathan LeVine Gallery, Located at 529 West 20th Street, 9th Floor, in the Chelsea Gallery District. Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11 AM to 6 PM.
Being a veteran of the Orange County punk scene of the late seventies/early eighties, I’ve seen my share of the cultural phenomenon known as the mosh pit. With his background as a musician in New York’s downtown post-punk noise scene of the early 1980s, the paintings of artist Dan Witz will surely strike a chord in the heart of anyone with a similar cache of experiences via his new exhibit, Mosh Pits, Human and Otherwise, up now at the Jonathan Levine Gallery. This vibrant collection features large-scale oil paintings on canvas produced by Witz over the past ten years.
