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| Blue Leah by Daniel Maidman, Oil on Canvas, 24x36 | |||
| BLUE LEAH | |||
| DANIEL MAIDMAN | |||
| Solo Exhibition | |||
| October 17 - November 2, 2012 | |||
| Opening Reception | |||
| Thursday, October 18, 6:00-10:00pm | |||
| Meet Daniel @ Opening Reception | |||
| Artist Talk and Intro @ 7:30pm | |||
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Dacia Gallery proudly presents Blue Leah, a solo exhibition of oil paintings and drawings by Daniel Maidman. Maidman's Blue Leah cycle documents a crisis, and renewal, of faith in figurative painting. Re-examining his assumptions, Maidman stripped his work down to the roots of perception, interaction, and depiction. The figure emerges on a monumental scale, purified, new, frighteningly alone. And yet, within this solitude, humanism persists. Even under scouring, personality and emotion remain. The method of excavation of these plain truths bestows a profound sense of relief on encountering them in the work. Their persistence within the formalism of the context resolves the crisis of faith that inspired Blue Leah. |
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| Daniel Maidman Painting Leah | |||
| ARTIST BIO | |||
| Daniel Maidman's work has been shown in juried exhibitions nationally, as well as having been selected by the Saatchi Gallery to be displayed at Gallery Mess in London. His art and writing on art have been featured in ARTnews, Poets/Artists, American Art Collector, Hyperallergic, International Artist, Manifest, The Artist’s Magazine, and the publishing arm of SUNY-Potsdam. He blogs for The Huffington Post and Artist Daily. His writing on Da Vinci is currently taught at DePaul University and Roosevelt University. His paintings range from the figure and portraiture, to still lives and landscapes, to investigations of machinery, architecture, and microflaura. His images occupy a spectrum from high rendering to almost total abstraction. His work is included in numerous private collections, among them those of New York Magazine senior art critic Jerry Saltz, Chicago collector Howard Tullman, Disney senior vice president Jackson George, best-selling novelist China Miéville, and author Kathleen Rooney. He lives and paints in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. | |||
| ARTIST STATEMENT | |||
| For some years, I made figurative paintings by a kind of artistic reflex. Then suddenly, I found that I'd lost track of why I was painting the figure. It was unfortunate, because I’d finally gotten pretty good at it. But getting good is often a sign that it’s time to move on. I started working aggressively on breaking the boundaries of my idea of art. My eye was cast outward before, seeking the soulfulness in people and things. I don’t intend to stop this search. But I've added to it an exploration of the vast unmapped inland, the wild center of the continent of the self. In line with this branching out of my interests, my pictorial paradigm expanded. I am now making expressionist paintings, depending for some on the formal concepts of the color-field painters, for others on the linear approach of pure geometry, and for others still on idioms I am developing for the depiction of enormous masses and obscure forms. I am also continuing to work on highly-rendered figures. I feel that my new avenues of exploration have rejuvenated and refined my approach to the figure; by going away from it, I was able to come toward it. | |||
