Walter Dahn (1954–2024)

German artist Walter Dahn, a progenitor of “Bad Painting” and a founding member of the Junge Wilde, a group of artists who rejected Minimalism and Conceptualism in favor of a raw, expressionist style inspired by graffiti and cartoons, died in Cologne on November 11. He was seventy. His death was announced by the gallery Sprüth Magers, which represents him. Working across media including painting, sculpture, film, photography, and screen prints, Dahn with his signature fuss-free style placed the naïve in dialogue with the refined, deploying symbols and slogans to investigate art’s relation to culture, often eliciting a strong emotional response. “One must take something visible,” Dahn once explained, “in order to show the invisible.”

Walter Dahn was born October 8, 1954, in Tönisvorst, Germany. In 1971, at the age of seventeen, he enrolled in the Staatliche Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where he encountered Blinky Palermo and Sigmar Polke. Among his professors was Joseph Beuys, whose influence on Dahn was profound, both in terms of the expansiveness of what art could be and in his devotion to its practice and teaching. When Johannes Rau, then Minister of Science and Research for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, moved to fire Beuys for political reasons, Dahn was one of the students who participated in Beuys’s famous barricade, spending two nights inside the academy alongside their teacher before he was forcibly removed by police. As well, Dahn during his Düsseldorf years spent time at the renowned nightclub Ratinger Hof. Then run by Carmen Knoebel and redesigned by her husband, artist Imi Knoebel, the club was crucial to the eventual formation of the heavily electronic Neue Deutsche Welle, or New German Wave.

In 1979, having left the academy, Dahn with a group of like-minded artists including Hans Georg Adamski, Peter Bömmels, Jiři Dokoupil, Gerhard Kever, and Gerhard Naschberger founded Mülheimer Freiheit, named for a Cologne street where the members shared a studio. Giving rise to, and becoming a part of, the broader movement of the Junge Wilde, also known as the Neue Wilde (Young Wild Ones), these neo-expressionist artists pushed back against the established art forms of the day, much of it stark and understated, with works characterized by vibrant hues and broad, lightning-speed brushstrokes. The work of the members of Mülheimer Freiheit varied in style; Dahn, who would collaborate with Dokoupil through 1984, favored the speedy application of paint in figurative works that blended a punk ethos with a comic-book aspect. Typical of his works of the early 1980s are The Memento m., 1982, which depicts a skull offered up by a hand protruding from the sleeve of a coat whose garish red color evokes the garment of a used-car salesman; Selbst im Anzug (Self in Suit), 1982, a roughly seven-foot-high slapdash depiction of a rectangular head wearing an embarrassed expression; and Der Trinker (The Drinker), 1983, a spray-painted skull, its mouth wide as it attempts to guzzle from a floating glass.

In the late 1980s, Dahn’s interest in painting seemed to wane, and he turned to modestly sized bronze sculptures that evoked a similar comedic mien, among them Selbst als Straßenkehrer (Self as Street Cleaner), 1986, showing a glowering figure pushing a broom through a sea of muck; Die natürliche Dreifaltigkeit (The Natural Trinity), 1986, portraying the head of a bewildered looking man centered between two crosses and topped with what appears to be an animal skull with a tree branch protruding from its crown. As the twentieth century wore on, Dahn began making screen prints, eschewing their capacity to be repeated and creating one-offs rather than editions. These, too, provoked, if not always with their content—later silk screens such as Double Damage and White Riod, both 2006, centered largely around text, suggesting the Joke paintings of Richard Prince or the work of Ed Ruscha, as Robert Pincus-Witten has noted—then through the artist’s refusal to monetize them through multiple iterations. “Taken as a whole,” Jason Farago wrote in Artforum in 2013, reviewing an exhibition of Dahn’s work curated by Richard Prince, an ardent admirer of the artist, “his spiky paintings and ‘anti-silkscreens’—Dahn’s term for one-off multiples—argue persuasively for an aesthetic beyond politeness.”

In addition to his work as an artist, Dahn was an accomplished musician and played in numerous bands, including most notably the techno-industrial group Die Partei, which he formed in 1981 with Jiři Dokoupil’s brother Tom. From 1995 to 2017, he taught painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig. His work is held in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Saint Louis Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Rubell Family Collection / Contemporary Arts Foundation, Miami; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Museum für Moderne Kunst MMK, Frankfurt; and Schaulager, Basel, among numerous other institutions.