Unseen Art Scene: Best of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair

Saturday, 17 October 2015

Best of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair | London

Born in 1959 in Kimberley, South Africa. Lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa; London, UK; and Kas, Turkey

Daniel Blom, 'Priest', 2012, Reconstituted wood, iron particles and wire, 34 x 103 x 60 cm, Courtesy of ARTCO Gallery

Daniel Blom is a figurative sculptor and installation artist who utilises the human body as a stage for deconstructing and reconstructing visual form. His polymorphous sculptural figures, often more bestial than anthropoid and devoid of arms and shoulders, reject a human verticality. Instead they balance one-legged on a scaffold perch, such as with Blom’s birdy (2010), or appear hunched in a horizontal mode, more commonly associated with predatory canids, as with wolf (2009).

The white installation space, while maligned by some for its saturation of a certain ideology, is the favoured modus operandi for Blom. He considers the minimal environment perfectly suited to emphasising his raw, austere approach to minimalist sculpture. Materials that can be moulded and manipulated, such as plastic, wood, steel, resin, and fibreglass, accompany Blom’s ideals. Blom is a member of the Royal British Society of Sculptors in London.

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Works

Sculptures

Daniel Blom is a figurative sculptor and conceptual installation artist who uses the body, its partialized components, and some inanimate objects to translate the concept of order into text and sculpture. As a unit of visceral and conceptual meaning, it is repeated regularly and methodically as a corpus catalogued until meaning is violent and unusual.


RETRACETED FIGURE.BLISS, 2012 High density polyethylene, iron particles and steel 181 x 26 x 42 cm

In the closed and introverted system of the installation space where obsession, compassion, and humour are not contradictory, structures made of high-density polyethylene, wood and steel, function in rooms that strengthen the specific reductive approach of removing all non-essential elements to concentrate on concept, line and mass to get to the rawest and purest form of an austere minimalism. This awareness of abstraction is rooted in context where the process and the titles of the works suggest larger narratives concerned with the ordinary, the uncommon, and the ideas brought to bear.
As the focus is the simplification and intensification of the isolated form, its expression is in structure-based ordered arrangements, iteration, and seriality.