Daniel Silver Coming Together

In his sculptural work the London artist Daniel Silver (b1972, lives in London) mixes all kinds of clichés of the western history of sculpture and culture together. Having grown up in Israel as the son of parents and grandparents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe to South Africa and Zimbabwe, he soon came in contact with the different heritage of each cultural context. His artistic work feeds from this “in-between state” and illuminates the multicultural inheritance in a winking but also critical way. In particular his debate with African sculpture can be integrated into post-colonial attitudes to art. But Silver takes up a very personal position here and processes his own story again and again.

In his solo exhibition in the Kunsthaus Glarus he is showing several groups of works that came about in direct contact and cooperation with African sculptors in Zimbabwe. For the group of works called Coming together (Head series, 2006-2011) Silver collaborated with a group of professional sculptors in Zimbabwe to work police pictures of Afro-American prisoners condemned to death in Texas, which he had found on the Internet, into sculptures using traditional springstone and soapstone. Working with stone for the first time and cooperating with sculptors who also produce objects for tourists, Silver developed expressive portraits. They come about with a raw and sometimes unfinished directness and show a curious mixture of abstract-modernist sculpture and African-expressive reduction. In another especially for the exhibition in Glarus developed work complex of the Coming together-series he repeated this cooperation with pictures of classicist portrait busts and thus permitting the western and African traditions to strike even more directly onto each other. The cooperation leads to a blurring of authorship and to an experiment for those commissioning the works and the artists commissioned. For both groups of sculptures Silver develops specific forms of presentation. Instead of showing them on pedestals in the traditional way, he dresses the portraits up or gives them a basic bodily architecture. For the clothing, for example, he uses African fabrics that he finds in London, or he builds a landscape of pedestals reminiscent of an urban skyline. The display of the new series with its patchwork collection of African fabrics of different origins and the cooperatively developed sculptures reminds of exotic shop window- and even touristic sales displays.

For another group of sculptures which is presented in the basement Silver has worked with Carrara marble, referencing moderistic sculpture such as works of Henry Moore. The pedestals are again dressed in fabric from different cultural backgrounds. Besides his sculptural work Daniel Silver presents two series of water colour drawings. Even when working with water colour he employs sculptural methods. After perforating the outlines of a kenian woman’s portrait into a pile of paper he pours water colour into the punched holes. In result, each sheet of the pile shows the portrait in a different state of colourful blur.

The fascination for direct sculpture and handcraft with the material carries the modernist-romantic cliché of authenticity, individual expression, directness and vitality. Silver uses these associations to question contemporary sculpture as to what remains of actuality today in the play between personal expression and cross-cultural references. In his work with sculptors in Zimbabwe he does not simply make use of a one-sided formal working style but finds the way to a blurring of authorship and an experiment for the commissioner and the commissionee.

In the Kunsthaus Glarus, Daniel Silver is showing his work in a Swiss institution for the first time. It has already been seen in a solo exhibition in the Camden Arts Centre in London (2007) and in group exhibitions, for example in the Saatchi Gallery in London (2010) and the Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan (2010).