EXHIBITION ARCHIVE
Before the Wind
January 24 - March 21, 2026
The beauty and raw power of the natural world, always in flux, anchor Dan Gottlieb’s Before the Wind. Blending photography and painting, he creates luminous, layered images that capture movement, atmosphere, and transformation. The exhibition features recent works inspired by a 2025 residency at Bilpin International Grounds for Creative Initiatives in Australia. Immersion in the surrounding eucalyptus forests—and a historic winter windstorm sweeping north from the Antarctic—inspired breathtaking new works, including an infrared video projection capturing the forest’s heightened energy. Before the Wind continues Gottlieb’s decades-long exploration of landscapes shaped by human and natural forces, revealing their shifting, fragile beauty.
STATEMENT
In 2019-2020 a mega-wildfire scorched 500,000 hectares (1.25 million acres) across the vast eucalypt forests of Australia’s Wollemi and Blue Mountains. The “Black Summer” devastation was accelerated by the hottest, driest year on record. Many eucalyptus species possess an ability to survive fire by producing temporary branches to provide emergency energy for new growth – but hundreds of thousands perished in the blaze.
Like the practices of Indigenous peoples of the American West, Aboriginal nations of Australia lived with fire as a natural and essential element of the yearly cycle and as part of a cohesive relationship with the land. What we today call ‘controlled burns’ sustained a healthy patchwork of open areas, encouraging useful native plants to thrive for thousands of years.
This was before the European invasion changed everything.
This was before the age of megafires. This was the before.
Continuing a decade-long investigation of climate-impacted environments as a source in my art practice, I was invited by Australia’s Bilpin International Grounds for Creative Initiatives (BigCi) as a resident artist last June and July. I set out to create images in the eucalyptus and gum forests five years after the Black Summer. But, while there, a raging two-day winter windstorm roared up from the Antarctic, through the surviving eucalyptus canopy into the high country of the Blue Mountains. The charged atmospheric energy of the wind was loud and intense.
It was cold, and stunning to behold.
During the historic windstorm I spontaneously decided to experiment with infrared video of the eucalyptus canopy being thrashed about. It was terrible and beautiful, and inspired me to create a projected piece for an Australian exhibition in July. The piece was re-edited in NC, and is presented here, as an integral aspect of this exhibition.
Per my usual art practice, I wanted to understand climate-impacted ecosystems and related cultural systems. I absorbed what I could from Australian mentors: a North Queensland forest ecologist I befriended; a Sydney-based landscape painter; an aboriginal leader; and by hiking with BigCi’s co-founder, a wilderness explorer & writer.
Photographs were made using a full-spectrum camera and an infrared camera. Works presented here were completed in Durham with a process of my own design: archival UV-printed images onto clear sheets and paint applied in thin layers - many with ultra fine flakes of aluminum, bronze, copper, and mica to add depth and movement.
Figure | Ground
March 23 - May 18, 2024
Dan Gottlieb is best known for his blurred and distorted landscapes. Each piece begins as a photograph, which is then printed on acrylic and worked with a variety of paints and compounds to create a unique surface.
For 30 years Dan served as the Director of Design, Planning and Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art. He was instrumental in the creation of both the Ann and Jim Goodnight Museum Park and the West Building. His experience in museum and exhibition design has translated to a more thoughtful approach to exhibiting his own work. Figure | Ground, like Gottlieb’s previous shows at Craven Allen, presents an immersive installation with beautiful and provocative images.
In addition to landscapes, Figure | Ground features a suite of figurative work. Each piece maintains his trademark mixed media process, resulting in images that feel familiar while exploring this novel territory. Dan is interested in the titular figure-ground relationships as they have appeared in the art historical canon. “Artists, from impressionism and through various movements in the 20th century, incrementally dissolved figure-ground distinctions” he explains.
With this body of work, Dan Gottlieb positions himself somewhere along the timeline of artistic figure-ground perceptions, reveling in the ambiguity of it all. “That place between waking life and impermanence is where I find great beauty and inspiration” he says.
STATEMENT
Figure-ground relationships in art concern the perception of a subject within its environment – usually its background. Artists, from impressionism and through various movements in the 20th century, incrementally dissolved figure-ground distinctions. Interestingly, this devolution was parallel, especially early in the century, with an explosion of contemporary ideas in physics and psychology. Cubists and Futurists incorporated concepts of speed and multiple viewpoints, fracturing the picture plane into fragments, flattening space until figure and ground were often indistinguishable. By mid-century, color-field painting and other movements of the Avant Garde disposed of subject altogether, fundamentally altering figure-ground traditions.
The devolution of subject and narrative beyond abstraction was the artistic milieu into which my coming of age and education in painting, printmaking, and photography took root and fired my imagination. It settled into the way I see everyday objects and places and a constant strain in my work. As an artist, my interest in the ambiguity of figure-ground perception – that place between waking life and impermanence - is where I find great beauty and inspiration.
In a departure from recent exhibitions which centered on environmental concerns like climate induced wildfire, Figure Ground focuses on this core aspect of my work and includes a wide diversity of subject matter organized around my aesthetic explorations of ambiguity, mystery, and impermanence in forest walks, on city streets, spiritual spaces, and in private settings.
My sincere thanks to Craven Allen Gallery for this, my fourth opportunity to share work in this space. I hope viewers of Figure Ground will take a mindful moment with the pictures and perhaps reflect on our impermanence and the ever-changing beauty to be found everywhere.
Season Five
March 12 - April 16, 2022
Dan Gottlieb’s Season Five refers to the idea of an emerging fifth season of extreme weather, caused by climate change. The artworks feature Sequoia National Park, where redwoods are enduring forest fires, extreme precipitation, and other challenges -- altering a seemingly timeless landscape. ”My pictures are observations of the transient nature of life, its light, shadows and patterns that I find beautiful,” says Dan. “I hope they also evoke a sense of the temporal, non-solid matter that we call consciousness, ghost-walking between sleep and awake.”
STATEMENT
I am moved by nature’s brilliant forest forms and ephemeral blur of nature’s uncertainties - but terrified by the clanging alarms of environmental calamity. The comfort of four predictable seasons has disappeared - a fifth season of extremes is a weird new uncertainty.
I am especially interested in accelerating forest wildfires, foreshadowing global change. This collection was primarily inspired hiking the high country of Sequoia National Park in December 2021, in the aftermath of last year’s devastating KNP Complex and Windy Fires that decimated many groves of magnificent giant sequoias. Thousands of these incredible trees perished and many more will suffer delayed mortality. Megafires throughout the West are inevitable.
My December excursion to Sequoia was planned as the first in a project to witness impacts of wildfire largely caused by tragic combinations of severe drought, ill-conceived corporate and public policies, and escalating development into wild areas (the Urban-Wilderness Interface). Fittingly (I suppose) form Sequoia, heading north to the site of the Sierra’s massive Caldor Fire, I was forced back by an unusual “atmospheric river” of extreme precipitation from the Pacific.
As a hearing-impaired kid often cocooned in a private world, I’d squint at light, absorbed in the passing blur of the street. Still today, I find comfort in that place to make my pictures - impressions of light, place, and nature’s grand experiment.
American Landscapes in 4/3 Time
May 20 - July 1, 2017
“As America’s civil society erodes with terrifying speed and facts are re-cast as fake, it might seem trivial to dwell on nice pictures of nature. Or - just perhaps - reflecting on nature’s grand experiment now is more relevant than ever,” says Dan Gottlieb of American Landscapes in 4/3 Time, his new exhibition of mixed media work which combine photography, painting, and craftsmanship into enigmatic landscapes.
4/3 refers not only to Dan’s camera, but to a jazz rhythm which he sees reflected in nature’s endless improvisation: “… fixed and shifting patterns of light and form.” Gottlieb has had ample opportunity to reflect on the intersection of art and nature; as director of planning and design at the North Carolina Museum of Art, he is responsible for guiding development of the Museum Park.
STATEMENT
As America’s civil society erodes with terrifying speed and facts are re-cast as fake, it might seem trivial to dwell on nice pictures of nature. Or - just perhaps - reflecting on nature’s grand experiment now is more relevant than ever.
My own interest in and appreciation of nature’s ever-changing patterns deepens with the years. Our planet is an incredible laboratory of bio-chemical chance, evolution, and pattern – all in motion. These pictures attempt to evoke a personal view of nature’s fixed and shifting patterns of light and form.
I confess to photographic tendencies of a late 19th / early 20th Century Pictorialist, crafting soft-focus landscapes imbued with a certain romanticism, albeit made with my own processes, and with ample physical manipulation. I’m most comfortable with one foot in photography, one in painting, and a third in design and craft.
Landscapes in 4/3 time: Jazz is so interesting – any good tune has literally endless variations. I think its structure can be an apt metaphor for my perceptions of nature’s cool improvisation: an endless interplay of fixed and variable ingredients. Walking a forest’s shifting light, energy is syncopated with predictable and unexpected variables. A great tree’s awesome form bends in the wind. Leaves scatter in gorgeous patterns. Shadows shift and I walk in rhythm with a 4/3 camera to an upward swing and long exposure. If lucky, a good landscape is composed with the promise of art - and relevance.
Moving Pictures, Figure and Forest
November 21, 2015 - January 9, 2016
STATEMENT
For this solo exhibition of my work presented during the abundant transition of spring to summer, I share both botanical works on copper as well as figurative paintings. Choosing to paint from life slows me, allows me to honor and give reverence to a series of moments both external and within. The slow time that direct observation requires is a balm for my soul in this heartbreaking world. It is my hope that the layers of paint and nuanced meaning within these works offer a similar sense of healing and stillness to others.
Alongside botanicals and other figurative work is a collaborative body of portraits I’ve been lovingly calling ‘The Artists I Adore’. Each portrait depicts an artist for whom I hold deep respect and admiration. Each of these were also painted from life. Depending on the sitter, we shared anywhere from three to a dozen hours together to complete the oil painting on copper – my portion of the collaboration. I find this slow time together, where we share space, breath and stories the most compelling. It’s a quiet unfolding of connection. To truly see and be seen in this deep, earnest way feels like such a rare and generous gift made possible through direct observation.
I have chosen to paint these works on copper, a material with a long history as a substrate for oil painting since at least the 1400’s. As a precious earth metal, copper mirrors the inherent value of each of my sitters. Further still, I have chosen to present these portraits as tondos (circular formats), which evokes medallions or currency – forms traditionally reserved for figures of some historic legacy or stature. Presenting these Artists in this format, within this visual language, and choosing to frame them in substantial Dutch ripple frames, re-values and further honors them.