Lot 2203
Walter Dahn (German, 1954-2024), Houses in Motion (Talking Heads)
Lot Details & Additional Photographs
Stretcher dimension 73 3/4 x 63 1/2 in.
Wright Auction, Post War + Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, April 21, 2012, Lot 238
Walter Dahn was a German painter associated with the Neue Wilde movement, or New Fauves, that emerged in Germany during the late 1970s and early 1980s. A co-founder of the short-lived but significant Mülheimer Freiheit group and a pioneer of “Bad Painting,” he developed a way of painting that questioned the point of the medium. A student of Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Dahn developed a raw, expressive visual language that pushed back against the conceptual austerity of the preceding decade. He rose to prominence through his close collaboration with Georg Dokoupil, with whom he produced a body of work marked by irreverence, wit, and a restless hybridization of high and low cultural references.
Throughout his career, Dahn has explored a wide range of themes — from primitivism and tribal imagery to mass media and pop iconography — often layering signs and symbols in ways that resist fixed meaning. His paintings operate somewhere between figuration and abstraction, drawing on graffiti, comic imagery, and ethnographic motifs with equal fluency. Represented in major international collections and exhibited widely since his breakthrough years, Dahn remains a significant figure in postwar European art, celebrated for his ability to channel both spontaneity and conceptual depth within a single canvas.
