Blake Daniels is one of the artists in it recently published ‘100 painters of tomorrow’ , Thames & Hudson.
About:
Blake Daniels looks at the way a body is constituted by its surroundings, constructed spaces that are never as innocent as they portray. His paintings depict bodies and spaces that are constantly being altered, dislocated, and fragmented through the internalization of the socially built spaces they experience. Figure and ground relations must be reconfigured, and imagined, to account for the inherent hybridism that has arisen between representation and abstraction. This shift within Daniels paintings speaks to larger postcolonial conditions, contesting notions of pure race, gender, language and nationality. A combative shift of the body’s relation to space used to create identities non-contingent on linear narratives. A new ‘real’ no longer reliant on bearing the weight of fixed social algorithms. Left in the wake of late 20th century deconstructionism, Daniels work interrogates these fractures that oft constitute the ‘bastard’; inventing a wild and playful, yet astutely dark conception of his observed world.
Breakfast in Bed, 2013.
BLAKE DANIELS (b. 1990, United States), a recipient of the Edward L. Ryerson Fellowship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, has worked and exhibited across the United States, South Africa, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Canada and the United Kingdom. His large-scale paintings map abstraction directly onto figure and space, demanding a reinterpretation of how painting functions within the conditions of the twenty first century. Exhibitions include New Work, Sullivan Gallery, Chicago, Illinois (January 2013); the Free City International Arts Festival, Chevy-in-the-Hole Gallery, Flint, Michigan (May 2013); Mapping the Abstract, Beers.Lambert Contemporary, London, United Kingdom (August 2013) That Ship Has Sailed, Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts, Kingston, Jamaica (October 2013); amongst Daniels participation in the Rex Nettleford Arts Conference with the Edna Manley College of Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica and the Meeting Place: Caribbean InTransit Symposium with the University of the West Indies in St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago.
