~DAN ASHER / 1947 – 2010 / A BRIEF MEMORY
DAN ASHER at the opening of his solo show, ‘Bird of Prey’, GBE / GAVIN BROWN’S enterprise at Passerby, NYC
Oct 15, 2005
Archival Photo by NANCY SMITH / artloversnewyork.com
Dan was born in Cleveland Ohio in 1947, he moved to New York City in the late 70’s & died April 23, 2010 after a long struggle with cancer. He was 63.
he could be charming, but was super difficult. He lived on 9th Street in a very run down, messy apt. opposite the Russian baths. when he was broke, sometimes he sold drawings on the stoop.He was always way too out of control for his dad, who it was said, tried to beat him straight & obedient as a child. When he had had enough, he left high school, and took off to follow BOB MARLEY, on tour and, in Jamaica / taking photographs, which he promptly lost track off in the chaotic life he led. Many decades later a girl he used to know, showed up and said, “you left something in my cupboard” – the photos !! which he immediately turned around & sold to the Bob Marley estate for something rumored to be, at least $100,000 – a big, big sum in the 80’s – that kept him high rolling & in 5 star sushi joints for quite a while. the photos were also regarded to be a remarkable legacy of that early Marley time. So There !! no regrets, as they say. Dan had a deep passion for Indie music and made several low-fi indie video documentaries, as well as large oil stick paintings & small pencil minimalistic ‘scribbles’. MY late husband, gallerist, collector, flaneur-to-the-hilt & artist in-his-own-right, though he ultimately partied too hard, Simon Cerigo . . . . met Dan in 1982, at the legendary artist dive bar, the RED BAR in the East Village and they became life long friends. At this point, Dan began working on very gestural expressionistic oil stick on large paper pieces & when he could, on stretched usually raw linen. He had a dynamic solo show at Club 57 in 1982, and a solo show at the Red Bar in 1983. At one point he even shared a studio with Basquiat.
Simon had just started his own short-lived gallery, the ground breaking Simon Cerigo Gallery on Ave A, just below 12th Street & gave Dan one of his earliest gallery shows there in 1986. Dan went on to show extensively in the bigger galleries in New York, LA, Europe and Japan. One of the major galleries he was represented by was Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Koln, Germany. By 1997, Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo was showing his work in both Japan & around the globe.
DESPITE their differences, sometime in the early to mid 90’s Dan’s dad died and left him around $300,000 / which as you might imagine he burned through pretty quickly, and not just on 5 star sushi / playing penny stocks – were his big downfall. no matter how we’d try to counsel him, he’d reply “it’s MY money” – good old same old same old Dan. Before he blew it all, ($300,000 felt initially like an endless million bucks, back in the 90’s) he managed to get himself to remote and then untrammelled Antartica to photograph the endangered icebergs, a trip that was quite unheard of and quite fraught back then / that’s when I really intersected with him, when in consideration of my own organizing, archiving and photography skills, he hired me as a ‘studio assistant’ to help produce the resultant big body of iceberg work / comprising of mostly large c prints. and manage their shipment to various shows. Those were some of my favorite days, not to mention all the free, all you can eat, sushi or hi-brow East Village gourmet vegetarian lunches at the coolest venues, that were just then ‘sprouting up’ !!
early DAN ASHER, working artist print / iceberg. ca. 1998.
Collection: Nancy Smith
before there was digital / all galleries produced hard invite cards for their artists’ shows.
this one was about 6-1/2 x 4-1/2 inches, the reverse states:
Dan Asher… Ice(s)
September 9 through October 2nd, 1999
Opening Reception: Thursday, September 9 6:00 – 9:00 p.m.
GRANT SELWYWN FINE ART
37 WEST 57 TH STREET
NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10019
front: Untitled 19998 C-print 30″ x 40m”
(original card / collection: NANCY SMITH)
i always think of Dan with great fondness on Earth Day, because if he didn’t start it, or coin the expression he was certainly the first to talk about it with me, way before it was a media mainstay, and he pretty much died, on an Earth DAY, April 23, 2010 / so there !!
DAN, REST IN ETERNAL PEACE.
~Nancy
from left:
Simon Cerigo, Dan Asher, Nancy Smith
Tribeca, NYC – ca. 1982