Daniel Silver: Uncanny Valley

29 Nov 2024 - 18 Jan 2025 Golden Square

Daniel 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. 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.
Angel Dew, 2024
In the exhibition 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.
Fly With Me, 2024
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. Fly With Me has an incised drawing on one side of the marble which depicts a butterfly-like creature. For Silver, it is important for these sculptures to have ‘multiple moments of engagement’: a frontal encounter with the uncarved, aged marble which carries the marks of its archaeological history, which is then countered by the bright, clean carved side.
'It's a timely process. I'll make a mark, I'll cover them, I'll come back the next day. It has taken months for them to become what they are.'
Whistling - Dreaming, 2024
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.
Me, 2024
For this show, Silver returned to the writings and collection of Sigmund Freud, whose own Greco-Roman sculptures the artist acknowledged in the installation Dig in 2013.

Me is a reference to the viewer's experience of looking at sculpture and the idea that we might see something of ourselves in it. The head is abstract with an inscrutable gaze and attitude. Silver is interested in the idea of the kind of transference that one can have with an art object. Me and You both express something of the idea of looking at and being seen.
You, 2024
The totem is something that has fascinated Silver for some time, both as a form adopted by the Greeks and Romans but also as a representation of the inability to control one’s own body or conscience.

Silver was drawn to the idea of the totem in the context of dreaming: “in a dream you are not able to use your limbs to change the direction of what is unfolding, so you become a bystander on your own experience.”
Looking (Twin One) and Being (Twin Two), 2024
The artist has identical twin daughters, and he often finds himself looking at them both in an attempt to understand them. Looking (Twin One) and Being (Twin Two) are cut from the same piece of marble and are similarly carved. They describe an awareness of a more personal relationship between the artist and subject, as well as the connection that exists between the sculptures, uniting them as a collective group or family. While making the sculptures, Silver explains that it is important to look at each in relation to the others, constantly moving between them.
Kissing, 2024

Silver often returns to art historical references, employing motifs from modernist sculpture and archaeological objects when working on particular elements - perhaps an eye or an ear. Kissing is a reference to Brancusi's The Kiss (1907-08), but the marks in the marble also echo Lucio Fontana's slashed paintings.
King-Jester, 2024
King-Jester is a reference to Pablo Picasso’s Jester (1905), and to the idea of egos, both inflated and deflated. On the back of the sculpture, Silver has made marks in the marble rather like those of Michelangelo’s sculptures of prisoners or slaves where the carving appears to be incomplete.
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Photography: Ben Westoby

Videography: Jon Lowe

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Daniel Silver: Uncanny Valley

Photography: Ben Westoby

Videography: Jon Lowe

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Golden Square

Soho Square

Gallery Hours

Saturday 21 December 2024 –
Monday 1 January 2025: Closed

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