Daniel Silver
That Untitled is made from Carrara marble is more than aesthetically significant. The white stone has long been coveted by artists, and for centuries mined from its quarries in Northern Italy. It was the chosen marble for many of the sculpted masterpieces from the Renaissance, among them Michelangelo’s David (1504), after which Untitled is made. This coveted stone offers conceptual substance to Silver’s sculpture, establishing material lineage between past and present. The work takes as its primary form a replica bust of Michelangelo’s sculpture, bought at a roadside store near the Carrara quarries. The replica, altered by the artist’s chisel, becomes an uncertain artefact. It is as if time’s forward march has weathered David’s bust, which appears to melt under history’s weight. Like the marble itself, time becomes pliable in Silver’s hands.
b.1972, London
"I believe in the autonomy of the object,” Daniel Silver says. “It is through the object that I discover myself.” Playing the parts of both analyst and archaeologist, the artist returns to the sculptures of antiquity to understand the psychic weight they continue to carry. He unmakes historical art objects to study their inheritance, working against the familiarity of their image. Silver is, above all, preoccupied with the Roman copies of Greek sculptures, and many of his sculptures are in turn copies of these copies, however inexact. He works often with found objects – with replicas of classical statues carved in marble – that he might augment and distort the imagined original. There is to his sculptures a material sensuality in this tactile shape-shifting and the lasting intrigue of the known made strange.