NYSS is pleased to present Eyal Danieli: A Man of Parts, the first survey of the late artist’s work, curated by Robert Storr. The exhibition highlights Danieli’s explorations of a series of motifs over three decades, featuring works in oil paint; drawings in ink, charcoal, and conte crayon; and prints, including monotypes, etchings, and linoleum cuts. An opening reception will be held on Thursday, June 6 from 6 to 8pm.

Eyal Danieli was born in Pittsburgh in 1961 and spent the next seven years in the United States and Canada. He came of age and was educated in Israel, where he completed his required military service in the Israel Defence Forces before embarking on his artistic training at Bezalel Academy of Arts & Design. Danieli chose to leave Israel and make his life in New York City, where he continued his art education at the New York Studio School. 

As Robert Storr writes in his curatorial essay, “He was an uncommonly brilliant thinker about the most vexed questions of cultural identity that have dominated art criticism and artistic creation in recent years, as well as a painter and draftsman wholly and unapologetically committed to his vocation.”

Danieli’s work encompasses silhouetted likenesses of an array of metamorphic motifs that symbolize a wide range of aesthetic, historical, and spiritual preoccupations. “The images that obsessed him did so because his attitudes toward and thoughts about them were inexhaustibly unresolved,” observes Storr. Among his imagery are ethnic stereotypes that become ever more enigmatic with each iteration and a figure with a raised arm whose multitude of poses collapses a span of history from the 1940s to our own. Danieli worked both from models in the studio and from photographic and media sources. Storr writes, “The bluntness of his graphic touch is the foil for his ambivalent regard for the specific subjects he repeatedly addressed and over which he labored long and hard example-by-example. Ceaseless reiteration was his basic methodology, as if grinding pigments into a ground would release their latent capacities to speak fragile existential truths to blindly belligerent power. And, as if stating and restating a form would free its buried spiritual content, which almost alchemically it did in series after series.”

A Man of Parts includes the abstract stripe and grid paintings that Danieli produced in 2021-2022. Storr writes that the stripes, which Danieli referred to as surrogates, “quiver and quicken with diffusing stress, and some are pulled askew by unknown forces, making them unique in the lexicon of geometric abstraction.”

All of the works in the exhibition, as Storr explains, are inflected with Danieli’s “unmatched gift for graphic condensation along with the darkest, grittiest of gallows humor, whilst pairing his characteristic dialectical generosity of feeling with bone-chilling dread.”

On Wednesday, June 12, at 6:30pm, NYSS will host a screening of “Some Restrictions Apply,” a 2022 discussion between Danieli and art critic Michael Brenson.

On Wednesday, June 26, at 6:30pm, curator Robert Storr will be joined by Michael Brenson, Elizabeth Hazan, Elena Sisto, and Alexi Worth in a discussion of Danieli’s work. The event will be held both in person and live-streamed via Zoom. To attend virtually, please register by clicking here. 

NYSS will host an alumni event on Thursday, July 11 from 6 to 8pm to celebrate the School’s robust community of dedicated alums.

An exhibition catalogue will be available in fall 2024. 

Eyal Danieli (1961–2023) lived and worked in Queens and Brooklyn. He studied painting at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem and the New York Studio School (1985–1990). He exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Israel, and Europe. Recent exhibitions include Eyal Danieli: Late Works at the Elizabeth Harris Gallery and Preoccupied at at 57W57 Arts. 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. Danieli’s work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint, The Brooklyn Rail, Art Critical, and The New Yorker. The Brooklyn Rail published a tribute to the artist in the April 2024 edition.

The School extends a special thank you to Michael Brenson, Amanda Guest, and Robert Storr.