The work of painter Dan Climan depicts everyday scenes with an underlying uncanniness, exploring the tension between the familiar and the unknown. Both stylistically and thematically, Climan’s oeuvre draws from mid-century cinema, photography, and advertising. His paintings invoke the era’s non-digital simplicity with flat, clean-edged forms and wide-open compositions; their sparse canvases are populated with common objects and nostalgic figures — radiators, barns, dogs — that feel eerily out-of-place. Like a frame from an old film or a snapshot taken from a car window, Climan’s works capture fleeting moments-in-time: emotive, unresolved narratives that ask the viewer to draw their own conclusions.

Dan Climan (b. 1987, Montréal) received his BFA from the Emily Carr University of Art + Design in Vancouver, Canada. He currently lives and works in Montréal, Canada.