Michael Alan
painter
Michael Alan (born July 13, 1977, New York, NY) is a New York City-based artist. He works in various media, including drawings, paintings, prints, sculptures, video and performances.
In 2010, Robert Shuster of The Village Voice wrote, in reviewing Alan's solo show Harmonious Opposites, “Alan’s thread-like lines are manically impulsive; they barely go an inch without detouring. Short, jagged strokes, tiny loops, and quick arcs make jittery, skeletal outlines of distorted human forms. Hasty daubs of blues and pinks wrap the frames with translucent skin while also conveying the blur of movement. Alan loves motion; in Move in Distance, a dancer’s five legs, kicking up in successive positions, pay homage to those futurist studies in dynamism. Even the reclining male figure of Prostitution looks restless—the angular, attenuated limbs and their busy surfaces bring to mind one of Egon Schiele’s more anxious self-portraits.”
Birth and early life
Alan was born in New York City. His family moved all over the city, from Queens to Staten Island, to Brooklyn and back. At age 19 he became a co-owner of a nightclub, Michael Alan's Playhouse, through which he began organizing artistic events. With the money saved from his nightclub work, he attended the School of Visual Arts.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michael Alan” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.