elizabeth harris gallery

press release

eyal danieli

late works

february 24 – april 6, 2024

catalog available

The Elizabeth Harris gallery is pleased to present Late Works, a selection of recent work by Eyal Danieli; his fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. Danieli was anticipating this exhibition, working intensely in his studio, until he died after a brief illness in 2023.

The exhibition, spanning the whole gallery, includes small and medium-format paintings in oil and oil stick, and drawings in charcoal and ink, from 2021 to early 2023.

In 2020, Danieli’s practice veered from his serial  images of violence and power toward an abstract structure of stripes.  Many of the paintings shown, titled Some Restrictions Apply, are on Danieli’s used paper palettes that he mounted onto clean stretched canvas, retaining the vivid colors he mixed to create somber stripes. The most recent paintings evolved into thickly colored grids and multiple explorations of this abstract idiom.  Danieli found immense pleasure in the painting process, returning over and over to the grids. Like the stripes, they served as a matrix for the artist’s own anxiety, dismay, and horror - a continuing witness to history.

“The paintings are all abstract, but not absolutely so” Michael Brennan wrote in his review of the recent solo exhibition, Preoccupied at 57W57 Arts.  “Danieli’s blunt but sensitive instrumentation has something that the art historian Meyer Schapiro might have described as “uncanny finesse,” using organic forms to smuggle otherwise difficult social commentary into view.”

Eyal Danieli lived and worked in Queens and Brooklyn. He studied painting at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and the New York Studio School. He exhibited his work in one person and group exhibitions in the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Danieli was a recipient of The New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Drawing, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, and a Key Holder grant from The Lower East Side Printshop. An exhibition of Danieli’s work, curated by Robert Storr, will open at the New York Studio School in June 2024.

The Gallery is located at 529 West 20th Street, 6th floor, and is open Tuesday through Saturday 12-6pm.

For further information contact Miles Manning at 212.463.9666