Dan Basen - untitled Zipper painting, 1963

Dan Basen - untitled Zipper painting, 1963

Mixed media painting with zipper and paint on canvas

Signed and dated March '63 verso

"The true measure of Dan Basen’s practice lies in his fluency across multiple mediums, not generally combined in the work of one artist. He was a remarkably fecund and inventive sculptor, assemblagist, and early creator of installations or environments, but he was also a painter and conceptual artist, producing key works in each of these mediums..." - Galerie Gmurzynska
Given that the precocious artist Dan Basen died more than half a century ago at the young age of only 30 – his work is very elusive and not to many pieces are available for acquisition. 

Untitled Zipper

mixed media zipper and paint on canvas

Signed and date March 1963 in graphite pencil on back

Unique

Double Framed

Measurements:

Painting:
7 inches (vertical) x 10 inches (horizontal) 

Framed:
15.25 inches (vertical)  by 12.25 inches (horizontal) by 2 inches

Dan Basen, a New York avant-garde artist who died in 1970 at the age of 30.
Dan Basen (1939-1970) was an American sculptor, painter, and assemblage artist. He is best known for incorporating found objects into his work. Basen exhibited at galleries including Allan Stone Gallery, Betty Parsons Gallery, Byron Gallery, and Matthew Marks Gallery. His work is held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The excerpt below is from text by Dr. Jonathan D. Katz, Associate Professor of Practice, History of Art and Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at University of Pennsylvania, as pat of Galerie Gmurzynska’s superb presentation of Basen’s work at the 2025 Independent Art Fair in NY, which was followed by a monograph on Dan Basen. 
"Dan Basen didn’t have the time to let the dust settle and for his career to thus emerge in broad strokes as an exercise in intentionality. He looks like what he was when he killed himself at age 30, a talented artist struggling with an art world that was slow to recognize his gifts, and a struggling artist with severe mental illness who made work not because of this challenge, but in spite of it.
Basen’s art is ripe for rediscovery because the very identity constructs that would have counted against him in his day—bisexual, mentally ill, Jewish—are no longer conceived as burdens. More significantly still, his work rounds out a picture of the 60s which has focused on a few genre-defining artists to the exclusion of the manifold experimental art developments at this time. Basen was responsible for more than his share of those developments, not least in terms of happenings and the novel performative tendency in 1960s art. But the real qualitative index of Basen’s career is his fluency in multiple mediums not generally combined in the work of one artist. He was a remarkably fecund and inventive sculptor, and assemblagist, as well as an early creator of installations/environments, but he was also a painter and conceptual artist, producing key works in each of these mediums…”
Dan Basen didn’t have the time to let the dust settle and for his career to thus emerge in broad strokes as an exercise in intentionality. He looks like what he was when he killed himself at age 30, a talented artist struggling with an art world that was slow to recognize his gifts, and a struggling artist with severe mental illness who made work not because of this challenge, but in spite of it.
Basen’s art is ripe for rediscovery because the very identity constructs that would have counted against him in his day—bisexual, mentally ill, Jewish—are no longer conceived as burdens. More significantly still, his work rounds out a picture of the 60s which has focused on a few genre-defining artists to the exclusion of the manifold experimental art developments at this time. Basen was responsible for more than his share of those developments, not least in terms of happenings and the novel performative tendency in 1960s art. But the real qualitative index of Basen’s career is his fluency in multiple mediums not generally combined in the work of one artist. He was a remarkably fecund and inventive sculptor, and assemblagist, as well as an early creator of installations/environments, but he was also a painter and conceptual artist, producing key works in each of these mediums. 
But above all, Basen’s chief failure was in creating a recognizable style, a brand in his work, refusing that catch-all capitalist category that serves as a mnemonic device in our oversaturated media culture. His curiosity, fecundity and brilliant inventiveness, especially early in his career before his mental health began to decline precipitously, marked him as an artist’s artist and the very embodiment of the 60s revolutionary fervor. But at the same time, his freewheeling, markedly dissident rejection of art market imperatives consigned him to also-ran status. In short, Dan Basen is the anti-Warhol, and it’s high time we allowed the outsider to come in.