Two-Fisted Art Attack:

Denny Dent Retrospective

Main Gallery, June 10 – August 29, 2010





If you ever saw Denny Dent produce a painting you would at once understand why his exuberant technique earned the sub-line two-fisted art attack. Dent was a live performance painter who created his works in the time of a song, more often to rock-and-roll. When the music began he would launch onto his typically large canvas in a frenzy, sometimes with three loaded brushes in each hand. Paint would seem to fly. Steadily but swiftly the performer’s image would appear while at the same time the vigorous, spontaneous paint application somehow expressed the very intensity of the music itself. Often a painting was completed in a matter of minutes or at most the duration of a few songs.



Over twenty-plus years Dent became arguably the best-known and most favorably reviewed of performance painters. His subjects would come to include such music greats as John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Tina Turner, Elton John, Janis Joplin, Miles Davis, Mick Jagger and Garth Brooks—to name but a few. In time he expanded his interests to notables from the worlds of politics, religion, science and industry, sometimes even “channeling” important figures from the past.



Although California-born Dent traveled extensively to concert locales all over the world, he and his wife Ali Christine Flores-Dent made Denver their home base from 1994 to 2004. Complications following a heart attack tragically cut short his life and escalating career in March 2004, just a few days before his 56th birthday. This Arvada Center retrospective, featuring 50 characteristic works held in the artist’s estate, is the first ever under-one-roof major exhibition of his special talent.