Mosh pit paintings by Dan Witz

Brooklyn painter, street artist, and musician Dan Witz has a solo show opening at NYC's Jonathan LeVine Gallery on June 30. The series of large-scale hyper-realistic figurative paintings is titled "Mosh Pits, Human and Otherwise." From the Gallery:

Applying old master techniques, (Witz) achieves impressively convincing trompe l’oeil illusions of light, shadow and depth in his finely rendered portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The artist recently added digital media tools to his process (having previously used traditional projection methods). Combining old master techniques and digital technology, he photographs his subjects, composes in photoshop, prints an a-chromatic underpainting on canvas then glazes and scumbles over this foundation using traditional representational painting...

In contrast to paintings that portray throngs of punk youth, titled after music venues such as ABC No Rio, Witz expands upon the crowd theme to include a rush-hour herd of suit-wearing businessmen in Grand Central Station in addition to non-human subjects in other works with animals such as a pack of fighting dogs and a writhing mass of rats.

"Mosh Pits (Human and Otherwise)" (DanWitz.com)

Jonathan LeVine Gallery (Thanks, Maléna Seldin!)

• [Emmylou]

  I’ve been in a lot of mosh pits, and had the bruises (and one time, a scar) to show for it. These paintings take me back INSTANTLY to being and any number of shows. The cigarette smoke, the smell of spilled beer, side-stepping the puddles of vomit, shoving your elbow back at least as hard as he/she shoved you first…good times.

• [knoxblox]

  Where’s the one that shows a huge, gaping hole in the crowd, and three or four fools strutting about like deranged chickens trying to swing at anything in their path?

  • [EH]

    You mean like The Monkey, or are you only butthurt over punk r–er, hardcore?

    • [knoxblox]

      C’mon. I’ve been in some serious pits before, the last one (1993) being Jesus Lizard at a tiny little dive bar with a 15′ X 15′ dance floor.

      I mean the kind of mosh pit you’d find at a concert where it’s not really on the agenda, and nobody’s really sure if that’s what they’d really like to be doing. Say, a Breeders concert.

      Butthurt over punk/hardcore? I was out of high school two years before Big Black broke up.

• [knoxblox]

  Another link, with a quote and more non-mosh work:

  http://artodyssey1.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2010-05-04T17%3A26%3A00%2B01%3A00&max-results=1

• [generousmedium]

  A kindred spirit!
  http://www.generousmedium.com/RETROSPECTIVE/installationcatalog/hundspiele_1acrop5.html

  I’ll have to try to make it down to see this.

• [knoxblox]

  Not knocking the artwork at all, BTW. This is hyper-realism at its best.

• [cjp]

  Well. Guess I’m scraping the canvas I started today. Thanks a lot, BB.

• [Anonymous]

  I am reminded of Bruegel! xox

• [Anonymous]

  @ Alex

  You wish it had more “racial diversity,” but this would not reflect the reality of the situation. Mosh pits were/are heavily populated by white kids. Of course, there are exceptions. However, by forcing the scene to meet a ‘racial quota’ takes away from the slice-of-life approach by the artist.

• [Alex]

  Very beautiful renditions of a unique cultural phenomenon… I might actually consider geting one some day if there was more racial diversity, but that’s just a personal thing.