Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by William Daniels. In his second solo exhibition with the gallery, Daniels will present new oil on board paintings, each of which investigates the composition of an arch.
Daniels begins his artistic process by constructing aluminum foil maquettes of the figurative or abstract form that he plans to explore. The artist photographs reflections of light and color on the model, and then uses the resulting picture to inform his paintings, meticulously reproducing sections of the captured image in oil paint.
The arch is a structure with practical applications as well as myriad allegorical and romantic associations. Embodying grace and lightness, it symbolizes triumph, transition, and spiritual ascension. Daniels began exploring the arch as a subject in 2011, at first on the small scale characteristic of his earlier paintings. As his interest in the form developed, he began creating larger works in which he employs the arch as a repetitive motif, both within individual paintings and throughout his new body of work. These paintings, which pay homage to the structure, hover between realism and abstraction and illustrate Daniels’s rich style of painting.
William Daniels was born in Brighton in 1976 and currently lives and works in London. He received his bachelor’s degree from Edinburgh College of Art and his master’s degree from Royal College of Art in London. Daniels’s recent exhibitions include Inevitable Figuration, Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Pecci di Prato, Florence, Italy; Durchsichtige Dinge (Transparent Things), Kunstverein Freiburg, Germany; Mimesi Permanente, Fondazione Torino Musei, Torino; and Newspeak: British Art Now, The Saatchi Gallery, London and The State Hermitage Museum St. Petersburg.
