Selected Sculpture

Daniel Silver’s practice is influenced by the art of the ancient world, modernism, Sigmund Freud and psychoanalytic theories. In his new works the artist returns to the most traditional sculptural materials: bronze and marble. In these pieces he begins with the marble itself, treating it almost as a found object, sometimes lightly dressing the stone or carving onto it, but the piece remains essentially as it was discovered, its surface unique, marked by time and human interaction. The stone becomes a body and a plinth on top of which, and in response to, Silver creates a head, first in clay which is then cast as a unique bronze.

‘Kissing’ is one of the works in Silver's exhibition ‘Uncanny Valley’ where each piece is performing some kind of action; Dreaming, Listening or indeed Kissing. The sculpture references Constantin Brancusi’s ‘The Kiss’ (1907-08) and marks made in in the marble echo Lucio Fontana’s slashed paintings.

Blue Dive depicts a pair of feet diving into and being subsumed by the stone itself. The stone is Brazilian sodalite, a rare rock-forming mineral, which caught the artist’s eye at Studio Carlo Nicoli, Carrara where she often works. Cross was attracted to both its colour and its patterns, an opulent royal blue with creamy white veins. The highly polished feet, cast from the artist’s own, emerge from the roughly hued block. Presented as a fragment, these feet also recall the broken statuary of past civilisations we are so familiar with from museums and the ancient sites. Blue Dive evokes a sculpture lost in time, a kind of future ruin.