Derek Eller Gallery is pleased to present 1000 Horsepower Heart, a solo exhibition of graphite drawings by Dan Fischer. This exhibition brings together a selection of works created over the past three years.

With the proliferation of digital images, disposable with the tap of a finger, the photograph has become less significant; we’ve become accustomed to scanning through pictures, to brief, superficial exchanges. Fischer’s graphite drawings, meticulous transformations of photographs of artists or their signature works of art, counter this trend. His hyper-realistic drawings replenish the aura of each image; they are meditative intensifications of presence. His artistic process is almost monk-like in the solitude, time, and energy he invests in each work. His pencil translates plaster, ceramics, paint, metal, and flesh with alchemical skill. The drawings rarely measure larger than 8 x 8 inches, and their scale and detail invite the viewer to slow down and step in.

In this exhibition, drawings of artworks such as Roy Lichtenstein’s Head with Black Shadow, Jean Dubuffet’s Bidon L’Esbroufe, Sherrie Levine’s Newborn, and Isamu Noguchi’s 1000 Horsepower Heart demonstrate Fischer’s remarkable ability to transform sculptural space into drawing. Bruce Nauman’s Death/Eat neon is shown against a wall of black; a photograph of a performance by Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer, that they each drew over, is then drawn by Fischer. Through his deliberate choice of images and his labor-intensive creative process, Fischer examines the complex nature of the photograph, the portrait, and the iconic image. Also included in this exhibition are images of and/or work by Jean Arp, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mel Bochner, Georgia O’Keefe, and Jackson Pollock.

Dan Fischer’s work was recently featured in Lifelike at the Walker Art Center and Graphite at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. His drawings are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tate, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among other institutions. This will be his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery.

North Room: Alyson Shotz, Chroma

Chroma expands upon Alyson Shotz’s ongoing interest in the perception and sensation of color. The sculpture, a half sphere laminated inside with thin strips of clear acrylic and dichroic film, appears to be full of color that shifts as the viewer moves. However, there is no intrinsic color to any of the material. Instead it is the physical properties of the metallic oxides in the dichroic film that cause different wavelengths of light to either reflect or transmit some wavelengths more than others. This causes the color of the sculpture to change depending upon the viewer’s spatial relationship to it, in addition to the added variables of angle and intensity of incident light. In collaboration with environmental and viewer interaction,Chroma is a vehicle for the experience of intense pure color.

Alyson Shotz has a current solo exhibition at the Edythe and Eli Broad Museum, East Lansing, MI. Recent solo exhibitions include The Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Espace Louis Vuitton, Tokyo, Japan; and the Borås Konstmuseum, Borås, Sweden. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York among others.