Daniel John Gadd “Animal”

M. David & Co

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M. David and Co. presents Gadd’s latest body of work and his third one person exhibition in our space: Animal. Along with numerous group exhibitions, this will be Gadd’s fourth solo show in the last three years, with his most recent exhibition having been held at John Davis Gallery in Hudson, NY.

Over the last three years, Gadd’s work has found great success among collectors and critics.

In publications such as White Hot, Hyperallergic, and video blogs like Gorky’s Granddaughter and The Kalm Report, all roads lead to the same conclusion .

The power and poetry found in his work, its passionate physicality and vulnerability creates a visual equivalency to the complexity of what it is to be human; creating a bridge between the artist and the viewer through this visceral connection.

“What is most compelling about this work, beyond infusing a dumpster aesthetic with iridescent, baroque beauty, is the way its formal intuition guides each convulsion: the architecture hidden beneath the whirlpool, magnifying the scope of meaning. The cracked, mottled surfaces are more than simply signifiers of discontent: they are evocations of moss and weeds; rivers and sewers; dirt and rust; blood and smoke. We can view Gadd’s imagery as a repackaging of nature, as Scarpa recommended, but it also can be something else — anything else — without feeling arbitrary or facile, which is a testament to the artist’s emotional conviction and material sensitivity. However, we approach them, these hulking, tough, fragile, partially destroyed, persistently regenerative works go a long way toward embodying this troubled, electrified moment.”

Thomas Michelli on Daniel John Gadd’s work, Hyperallergic

Gadd’s new works shatter the boundary between painting and sculpture—Vernacular Art and Modernism— with an uncanny sense of balance, grace, violence, and intimacy.

Nothing looks as it seems—all of the “found pieces” are not found, but instead, carefully hand crafted using a wide range material from the industrial to the classical (paint, dyes, wax, plaster, resin) created by the desperation for the human touch.

In works like Bryce and Heron or Love and the Bird, whether hanging from the ceiling or tethered to the wall, Gadd intuitively creates a personal secular bestiary; a Catholicism turned heretical– mutated, human, tragic, heroic– for an age where nothing makes any sense, a staggering Man/Beast/Bird hybrid slouching toward Bethlehem searching for salvation where none may be found.