Anton van Dalen, a New York-based artist known for his fantastical cityscapes and his depictions of the East Village, passed away on June 25th at 86. His representing gallery, P.P.O.W, confirmed his death in a statement, noting he passed away due to natural causes in his sleep at his East Village Home.
Born to a conservative Calvinist family in Amstelveen, Holland, in 1938, van Dalen witnessed the upheavals of World War II firsthand when the Nazis seized his family’s property. After graduating from Amsterdam’s former Amsterdamse Grafische School in 1954, he emigrated to Canada with his family in 1954 and then to the United States in 1966. Settling in New York’s East Village, he then spent his life documenting the cultural transformations in the area through his surreal cityscapes or his monochrome series “Night Street Drawings” (1975–77), illustrating scenes of car wrecks, sex workers, and dilapidated buildings in the Lower East Side.
Van Dalen is perhaps best known for his performance piece Avenue A Cutout Theatre (1995), in which the artist entered a room with a large cardboard box resembling his apartment building strapped to his back. He then emptied the box’s contents—miniatures of dogs, police, and various figures resembling the population of the East Village—to examine the neighborhood’s history and gentrification.
“I try to sort of make art, and thinking and looking at art, something that we all naturally do and can figure out in our own way,” van Dalen once said of his approach, shared in a statement from P.P.O.W. “There is no one interpretation—there are many. And that’s what is wonderful about art. It’s not a biased single place. You can always kind of find yourself within it.”
The 2020 documentary Anton: Circling Home provided an intimate look at van Dalen’s life, emphasizing his profound connection to the East Village and his passion for rearing pigeons. The film, which won the Best Documentary Portrait award at DOC LA, highlighted how van Dalen maintained a pigeon coop on his building’s rooftop. Having first learned to train pigeons at the age of 12 in Holland, these birds are a recurring motif in his body of work.
His last solo exhibition, “Doves: Where They Live and Work,” was presented by P.P.O.W in 2022. In previous years, the artist showcased his paintings at venues such as the University of Massachusetts, Temple Gallery in Philadelphia, and EXIT Art in New York. Additionally, many of his artworks are featured in prominent collections such as the MET and the Whitney Museum of American Art.