Upright and Taking Nourishment

OPENING RECEPTION FOR THE ARTIST: August 15, 5:00-8:00 PM. Dates and times subject to change. Please sign our guest list to receive the latest updates about this exhibition.

In the late 1970s, Dan Chapman arrived at the University of Southern California as a premed student. A single ceramics class changed everything. He migrated toward artists and architecture students, found his way into the downtown Los Angeles art and music scene, and became one of the early regulars at Al's Bar. Close friends with legendary art-punk ensemble The Party Boys, Chapman helped them build the stage at Al’s where so much of that scene would unfold. He established his own practice in a downtown loft, making large paintings.

At the same time, he had begun cycling through the hills surrounding the city. That pursuit gradually claimed more and more of his attention, and as family life expanded and he helped his wife build a successful fashion business, his studio work receded. Chapman ultimately joined many of the local clubs in Santa Monica and raced for them in club, local and state events. Racing became his life.

Then, in December 2012, while training on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, Chapman was run over by a speeding pickup truck. The damage to his body was profound. The injuries required multiple surgeries, weeks in the hospital plus intense physical therapy. He has no memory of the incident, the hospitalization or the surgeries. The concussion effects alone have been a daunting challenge.

Unable to ride, unable to sustain the physical demands of his former life, Chapman sat at a table and slowly began to make art again. The work that emerged was as changed as he was. Reduced in scale, liberated in spirit, he turned to gouache on paper: cutting, stenciling, constructing. He built intricate paintings and delicate paper works with the same care he applied to his own rehabilitation. Patience became both method and subject.

That discipline has not relented. The work in this exhibition moves between chromatic exuberance and structural precision — vivid accumulations of painted paper strips pulse with embedded language; layered watercolors intimate mechanical systems freighted with organic memory; sculptural paper assemblages speak blunt words bejeweled with irony. Together the pieces hold fragility and resilience in the same frame, offering what reads simultaneously as celebration and admonition — a reminder of how permeable the boundary is between presence and its absence.

The exhibition's title, Upright And Taking Nourishment, is the phrase Chapman once heard used to describe his own condition during his hospitalization. He has adopted it as an aspiration — for himself, and for all of us.

Musée du Al is honored to present the work of Dan Chapman.