Artist Statement/ Biography

Melanie Daniel's work combines Israeli and Canadian imagery, personal history, and a bravura approach to painting. Raised in British Columbia, Daniel has lived for the past 17 years in Israel. A sense of dislocation emanates from her position as a citizen of two New Worlds, each one a hybrid existence. Her paintings have explored both the outsider's perspective on her new country and the expatriate's distant view of home. It is as if her new mixed identity has forced her to clear her own path, with equal parts symbol and invention. The way Daniel covers the rectangle with an eruption of varying marks, hides the almost haphazard intrusion of the human into the field of nature and paint.

Melanie Daniel was born in Victoria, British Columbia, and after studies in Canada completed her BFA and MFA at Bezalel Academy, Israel. Daniel received the 2009 Rappaport Prize for a Young Israeli Artist, with a solo exhibition "Evergreen" at the Tel Aviv Museum in 2010. She has had solo exhibitions at the Asya Geisberg Gallery in NY, Angelika Knapper Gallery in Stockholm, Noga Gallery, Tel Aviv, Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv, and Grandforks Gallery, B.C., as well as group exhibitions at Petach Tikva Museum, the Israel Museum, and Herzeliya Museum. Her videos have been screened in Kassel, Paris, Detroit, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. She is represented by the Asya Geisberg Gallery, NY.