Daniel Silver: Looking

11 June–25 September 2022

Edinburgh Festivals Exhibition

Painted ceramic busts, figures, and abstracted totems/vessels ranging in scale from table top to over life sized are exhibited alongside new works on paper – large heads and smaller drawings that express the figure in movement.

The exhibition opens with a group of busts arranged together in two tiers. They are reminiscent of a jury, a stadium crowd, people waiting at a bus stop. They look at each other, at us, and out to the gallery bookshop and the city streets beyond. They are joined by a selection of works on paper; heads painted in quick, deft gestures. In the light of the airy upper exhibition gallery is a selection of small, painted clay figures and heads that Silver describes as being like an action you do with the hand – figures swiftly modelled, fired, then painted on, the movement of the brush fusing with that of the hand and eye. On the walls are small drawings that capture the dynamism of the figure in movement, and the sculptures are grouped together on tables that have legs like people do, with large, lumpen feet. The effect is of matter coming into being, as though the very tables have life and spirit. The Warehouse hosts a group of abstracted clay totems/vessels which form relationships with each other, with the space and with us as we move around and between them, raising questions about what it is to look.

At once representation and process, Silver’s work captures the essential nature of both the body and the material in which it is worked. The exhibition speaks of human connection; of the process of looking and being and being looked at; of the intimacy of touch. 

Fiona Bradley, Director, Fruitmarket, said, 'I am so pleased to be able to bring Daniel Silver’s work to Scotland for the first time this summer. His work is about what it is to look and be looked at as much as it is about what things look like – his sculptures set up a generous, open exchange with the viewer'.

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