Daniel Silver: Uncanny Valley
Frith Street Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of works by Daniel Silver.
Silver’s practice is influenced by the art of the ancient world, modernism, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories. His new body of work conveys a sense of timelessness, engaging with the qualities of history – natural, geological and human – as departure points for making.
In this exhibition the visitor encounters a host of individual presences occupying the gallery space. The figures are a celebration of their own materiality and reflect on what it is to be human, and in the world, both physically and psychologically.
Here Silver returns to the most traditional sculptural materials: bronze and marble. He has long been fascinated by marble, a substance with many different histories and associations, from its emergence as a metamorphic rock created under the influence of great heat and pressure in deep geological time, to its use in classical art, architecture and beyond. Silver sources it from an old family stone yard in Pietrasanta, Italy. There, pieces of the quarried stone may have sat for hundreds of years collecting history before being selected.
The artist begins with the marble itself, treating it almost as a found object, sometimes lightly dressing the stone or carving into it, but the pieces remain essentially as they were discovered, their surfaces unique, marked by time and human interaction. These stones, which range from large boulders to more delicate pieces, become both bodies and plinths on top of which, and in response to, he creates a head, first in clay which is in turn cast as a unique bronze. Bronze, like marble, is a seemingly elemental medium and the heads themselves impart a sense of the perpetual. Their faces are benign but somehow inscrutable and they are all, according to Silver ‘in action’ – they might be whistling or singing, they might be deep in thought or dreaming.
The title of this exhibition comes from a song by the songwriter Johnny Flynn and author Robert MacFarlane, it refers to an underworld, to losing oneself or finding oneself lost.
