Dan Hernandez: New Work
January 14 – March 26, 2022
A multiverse view of culture, technology and the video game
20 North Gallery presents a solo exhibition of all-new work by Dan Hernandez, featuring both new media and traditional painting techniques. The exhibit comprises three series that explore the visual dialogue between religion, mythology and pop culture.
The exhibit will open with a free, Public Reception on Friday, January 14, 2022 from 6 – 9 p.m.
The exhibit continues through March 26, 2022.
Dan Hernandez’s work blends both digital appropriation and hand-painted iconography of early European Renaissance masterworks with historic and contemporary video game imagery, to draw intriguing, pithy and occasionally humorous analogies between them. The end result is simultaneously thought-provoking and visually compelling.
The mixed media artworks of Dan Hernandez create a captivating intersection between art styles of the past and present. Having identified similarities between the narrative styles of medieval, Renaissance and 8- and 16-bit video game art, Hernandez takes elements of video game design then draws, paints and screenprints engrossing works that connect cultures hundreds of years apart. Longtime fans of Hernandez’s work will be delighted to see new entries into his Genesis series, as well as to view the debut of his new Reset and Los Santos series. These new series draw inspiration and source material from a variety of consoles and games including Nintendo, Sega Genesis and Grand Theft Auto V.
Dan Hernandez (Maumee, Ohio) was born in San Diego, California in 1977. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2000 from Northwest Missouri State (Maryville) and a Masters of Fine Arts in 2002 from American University (Washington, DC). He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at The University of Toledo (Ohio).
Since 2017, he has served The Arts Commission (Toledo, Ohio) on the Board of Trustees and as Co-Chair for the Art in Public Places Committee.
Hernandez has had solo exhibitions in galleries in Ohio, Michigan and Arkansas. His work has been included in many group exhibitions, including shows at Shizaru Gallery (London, UK), Southern Ohio Museum (Portsmouth, Ohio) Cindy Rucker Gallery (New York City), Strohl Art Center (Chautauqua, New York), Contemporary Arts Center (Las Vegas, Nevada) Lehman College Art Gallery (Brooklyn, New York), Westport Art Center (Westport, Connecticut), and the Riffe Gallery (Columbus, Ohio), MassArt Art Museum (Boston, Massachusetts), with his most recent group exhibition being The Garden of Earthly Delights, Through the artworks of Colección SOLO at Matadero Madrid, Centro de Creación Contemporánea (Madrid, Spain) as well as the two-artist show Hyphenated at McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina) in 2021. Hernandez is represented at Galeria Meraki in Ponte de Sor, Portulgal in addition to Kim Foster Gallery in New York City, where he has enjoyed five solo shows and at 20 North Gallery, where he will have his most recent solo exhibit, Dan Hernandez: New Work on view through March of 2022.
His work is in numerous private collections, both national and international, and has been featured and reviewed in several distinguished publications, including ARTnews, HyperAllergic, Artillery Magazine, Arte Fuse, Gizmodo, and Der Spiegel. Dan Hernandez was awarded the Bellinger Award at the Chautauqua Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Art in 2010 and has been twice selected for an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, in 2011 and 2015. Hernandez’s work forms part of the permanent
collection of Colección SOLO in Madrid.
Artist Statement
This exhibition features 3 different bodies of work—Genesis, Reset and Los Santos. As such, it may appear to be more of a group show than a solo exhibition. While each body of work is distinctly different, they share a common thread—the works in this exhibition draw important source material from video games. The Genesis and Reset works mostly draw on the 2D game worlds that were common in 8- and 16-bit video game systems like Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Where the Genesis body of work in this exhibition focuses on a narrative approach to imagery that borrows pictorial formats from these video games, the Reset work centers around the objects, characters and patterns of these games—mixing them in more abstract relationships. Neither of these two bodies draws directly from one specific game or system. Rather, they are synthetic constructions inspired by the whole canon of games in this genre. Conversely, the Los Santos body of work focuses its attention on a single more contemporary video game—Grand Theft Auto V (GTAV). The works in this body use the virtual landscapes of GTAV’s fictive city of Los Santos and its surrounding areas as their source material.
For purchase inquiries, please contact
20 North Gallery:
419-241-2400 or info@20northgallery.com
Dan Hernandez: New Work Installation Images:
