Daniel Horowitz: Noble Savage

22 April - 20 May 2017
Overview
Daniel Horowitz, Noble Savage

“A given culture is only as strong as its power to convince its least dedicated member that its fictions are truths.” Edward  J. Dudley

 
In the newest body of work, Daniel Horowitz continues to explore the tension between the individual and civilization.  The wildness of the natural world has been subjugated by conquest and science. Similarly, Freud argued that in order to participate in civilization man’s inner most ‘wildness’ must become repressed. However the component archetypes of the noble savage are still very much alive in the interior of our mind, clamoring for release. By reorienting existing images from society’s detritus, Horowitz exposes our contemporary reality with all of its social anxieties and displaced identity. Like an archeologist he mines the visual legacy of culture and peels away the surface of existing images in an I attempt to unlock that which binds us all together.

Horowitz’s practice encompasses drawing, painting, collage, and installation, and often incorporates a direct relationship with and intervention into historical material. The works in the exhibition are primarily oil painting on raw linen stitched with reapproriated textiles as well as on 18 century dutch engravings.

 

Horowitz recently had been commissioned a body of 20 works on paper by the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, an exercise in psuedo-historical documentation. The objective was to retell a fictive safari by directly subverting and manipulating 18th and 19th century engravings and reintegrating them into the permanent collection of the museum, in effect questioning ontological role of the museum, as a purveyor of truth and fact.

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