EYAL DANIELI
Preoccupied
November 12, 2023 - January 5, 2024
WAITING ROOM - AL’S OFFICE - MELANIE’S OFFICE - SHELF
Two Coats of Paint review by Michael Brennan
Preliminary Conclusions #16 by Al Ravitz
57W57Arts is pleased to present Preoccupied, a selection of work by Eyal Danieli. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. One of his paintings was included in “27 Small Paintings” in The Waiting Room, in January 2023. At that time, Sue and I got to know Eyal for a brief time. We loved his warmth, his humanity, and of course, his refined artistry; fortunately, he loved our space as well, and we decided to “do something together” at some point in the future. Shortly after that series of brief meetings, however, Eyal took ill, and within a matter of days he was gone.
We are beyond honored to present this show of deeply felt paintings. The current exhibition spans all three rooms.
Danieli was an artist preoccupied with recurring imagery and memories. Thinking in series was innate to developing and often to displaying his work. Exploring repetition of image, changing and shifting permutations and meaning, he worked using variations in paint stroke, density, distance between lines, presence and absence, in shades of black, white, and ochre. “Doing another one ... releases me from the previous one, but the drawings that follow do not supersede those that came before.”
In the “Scars and Stripes” series, lines of oil paint move slowly across the ground, whether unprimed linen or a sheen of painted, primed canvas. In the series, “Some Restrictions Apply,” stripes of oil stick are drawn or brushed in thick paint on grounds of colored paint “markings” of old paper palettes. With “Holy Smoke,” Danieli chose to face the images of plumes of smoke over and over again, in silhouette studies in oil on canvas, and oil stick on Indian ledger paper, mounted on canvas.
“I have been overcome by these stripes.They have served as surrogates,” Danieli said in a 2022 conversation with Michael Brenson. There is a release and almost glee in the process of laying the lines down and constructing layered, reverberating paintings in his recent works.
On the shelf in The Waiting Room are “tools of the trade,” an assembly of canvas-wrapped bricks, framing weights that Danieli made and used in mounting artwork. Craftsmanship was present in his work as a conservation framer, as well as a painter.
Eyal Danieli, 1961-2023, lived and worked in Queens and Brooklyn. He studied painting at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and at the New York Studio School. He exhibited his paintings, drawings and installations in one person and group exhibitions in the U.S, Israel, and Europe, including MoMA PS1, Elizabeth Harris Gallery, New York, and Martin Kudlek Gallery, Cologne. He was a recipient of The New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Drawing, The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award in Painting, and a Key Holder grant from The Lower East Side Printshop. In 2024, Elizabeth Harris Gallery will host the artist’s 5th solo show at the gallery, and the New York Studio School will host a memorial exhibition.
Website: eyaldanieli.com; Instagram: @eyaldanieliredux.
Thank you to Susanna Blavaarg, Guy Corriero, Marilyn Gold, Amanda Guest, Daniel Hess, Sue Ravitz, Al Ravitz, and Lyle Starr.