Daniel Silver and Abraham Kritzman

Elizabeth Xi Bauer is thrilled to present a duo exhibition with Daniel Silver and Abraham Kritzman. This will be the first time Silver’s work will be displayed at Elizabeth Xi Bauer Gallery, and the first time both artists exhibit together, evidencing mutual interests, themes, and use of materials in their respective practices.

Abraham Kritzman’s work is an ongoing investigation into notions of man-made – from paintings and sculptures to architecture and landscape. Kritzman’s multidisciplinary production is often influenced by mythical narratives and perennial imagery. His technique is analogous to a dance, where he moves back and forward, adds and removes: symbols, layers of paint and three-dimensional matter, thus creating meanings through paths that are seldom linear. For this upcoming exhibition, Kritzman will exhibit large paintings displayed within painted black box-like structures, creating a looming presence within the Gallery space. These will be accompanied by bronze reliefs which he created in the South London-based Foundry Make Touch, run by artist Katrin Hanusch. Each unique bronze sculpture is patinated by Kritzman and will be installed on the Gallery walls. Both these series delve into the language that the artist has developed over the years, influenced by his travels around the world as well as his personal experiences of everyday life.   

Kritzman’s large-scale relief-like paintings bring together a menagerie of images, characters, and figures that merge in a thick layer of paint. To begin creating this body of work, he first adds a base colour as an underlayer. Copious amounts of oil paint are then applied on top of this underlayer, with the colour choice varying for each work. Layers are revealed underneath the wet paint as Kritzman oscillates through various thicknesses in a scoring process, producing intricate patterns and allowing larger areas to expose the underneath painting to a fuller extent. By the nature of paint drying, there is only a finite amount of time for the composition to be created before the window which enables the process begins to close.

Since his artistic debut in the late 1990s, Daniel Silver has shaped an artistic style that is distinctively recognisable as his own. Writer Gilda Williams described in a 2007 article for Art Forum, “Much of London-based sculptor Daniel Silver’s work occupies an in-between state — between complete and incomplete, between handmade and mass-produced, between artistic object and castoff”.

During a visit to the Italian marble quarry city of Carrara in 2007, Silver encountered discarded copies of Greco-Roman statuary, which he appropriated and carved into. These repurposed sculptures were then displayed on roughened wooden plinths, re-evaluating their worth, originality, and the transformation of an object from an artefact into an artwork. Silver continues to evolve his practice, exploring works on paper he participated in the 2019 Drawing Biennale in London. The latest chapter of his sculptural production incorporates the medium of clay. Recent works of unglazed clay painted over in oil paints have allowed him to further explore notions of psychoanalytic theory, human anatomy, and memory.  
  
Such an amalgam of notions converges in a new series of semi-abstract ceramic busts, executed in 2022, that will be displayed in this exhibition. These are adorned with oil paint and bear titles that reference an orchestra: namely a conductor and a selection of choir members. As its signature of his recent sculptures, the plinths are individually customised by the artist, thus acting as colourful geometric underbodies to the busts. Also, on show will be three large works on paper from the Untitled series that Silver made in California’s Death Valley in 2021 – that is, at the height of the pandemic. They consist of variations of the same subject: colourful, gigantic human heads that are devoid of necks. Silver's work blurs the boundary between reality and imagination, exploring the complexities of human relationships and forms.