Daniel Silver, "letting go" exhibition at AMP

AMP is proud to present the first solo show in Athens by the London based artist Daniel Silver.

In all of its psychological guises, the human figure is primary to the sculptural tableaux he presents in groups or pairings, and as stand alone individual works. His amalgamation of numerous styles is born from his cultural memory of a childhood spent between Europe, Jerusalem, and the African continent (South Africa, Zimbabwe).

While his formal academy training is rooted in traditional European sculpture, Daniel Silver underscores his approach with conceptual tropes. Blurring distinctions of authorship he's exploited the readymade through Carrara marble statues discarded from commercial workshops in Italy, subtly altered by his own hand. In Zimbabwe a series of portrait busts were done in collaboration with local craftsmen. The faces were based on photographic images appropriated from the Internet of men and women who were death row inmates in a Texas penitentiary.

Materially rich, this Athens show titled "Letting Go” is a new series referencing some of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman artifacts found in Greece. The pièce de résistance is a monumentally scaled work three meters in height cast in aluminum. Based on an untitled masterpiece of antiquity found in the Acropolis Museum, "The Artist, His Father, Son, and Alter-Ego” cannibalizes its classical appropriations through modern industrial means. A set of plaster floor sculptures looking much like egg-shaped clusters are abstracted topographies of the rugged landscape that comprise the country itself. A self-portrait in plaster, rubber, and wood chaise lounge suggests Freudian psychoanalysis as much as it self-mythologizes the artist himself. The strange bust of a young boy carved out of locally sourced marble has a peculiar asymmetry that is consistent with the idiosyncrasies found in the oeuvre of this sculptor.

Where his production is concerned "Letting Go” physically and mentally pushes the artist into new terrain. A synthesis of forms with remote traces of classical antiquity, primitive, and high modernist influences (Late Rodin, Gaudier Brezska, Henry Moore) contain the pantheistic origins of sculpture within a very contemporary discourse.

Daniel Silver is a part of the new generation of artists who cannibalize the classics with deeply psychological insights. The ungainly often exposed structural elements and unorthodox forms found in contemporaries such as Huma Bhabha, Thomas Houseago, and Matthew Monahan et al., have reinvigorated the sculptural genre despite the encroachment of new media's virtual panopticon.

Daniel Silver holds a BA from the Slade school of Fine Arts London and MFA from the Royal College of Art.

Selected solo exhibitions: "Coming Together”, Kunsthaus Glarus, Swiss, 2011 - solo presentation at Frieze Art Fair with IBID Projects London, 2009 - "Lion in Zion”, Gallerie Suzy Shammah, Milan, 2009 - "Making Something Your Own” IBID Projects London 2008 - "Heads”, Camden Art Center, 2007.

Selected group shows: "We Will Live, We Will See”, Zabludowicz Collection, London, 2011 - "Savage Messiah”, Rob Tufnell at 1 Sutton Lane, London, 2011 – "Head”, The Approach Gallery, London, 2010 – "The Cannibal's Muse” (curated by Max Henry), Patricia Low Gallery, Gstaad, 2010 - "New Speak: British art now”, Saatchi gallery, London, 2010. Text by Max Henry

The exhibition ends on Oct 29th 2011. Gallery Hours: Tue – Fri: 12:00 – 18:00 | Sat: 12:00 – 16:00