‘I kind of threw paint at in different ways so they end up looking like they are made of bird shit. They vary in size, touch and colour. Some of them look like Pollocks, some look very realistic, others are painterly, some are dumb, some are elegant, some are beautiful.’ (Dan Colen, ‘My Paintings Look Like Shit’, The Guardian, 16 February 2007). Dan Colen is one of the most radical contemporary artists; together with Ryan McGinley and Nate Lowman, Colen has formed the Bowery School that aims at revolutionising the formal language of painting and overcoming traditional media. Colen has created an extensive corpus of works using disparate materials, such as chewing gums, dirt and also flowers.

Birdshit is an irreverent work that fully epitomises the intention of the artist to employ oil paint as a subversive instrument to imitate other media, in this case birds’ excrements. This lot comprises four works produced between 2006 and 2007 where Colen has energetically splashed paint onto the canvas in order to create realistic compositions that remind of several birds’ droppings and make us wonder whether what we see is real. In his unique way of using the traditional medium of oil paint, Colen draws inspiration from illustrious precedents in the history of art. Birdshit is similar to the paintings of Jackson Pollock, executed with the so-called ‘dripping technique’: both artists share an innovative element of performing whilst painting. As Dan Colen has claimed regarding the Birdshit series: ‘What excites me is the idea of hypothetical pigeons being the performers, rather than me, so all the shit is the residue of their activity’ (Ibid.)