Artist: Daniel Domig
Exhibition title: These Mythical Bones
Venue: Reflexion Gallery, Beijing, China
Date: November 2 – December 21, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Reflexion Gallery, Beijing
Reflexion Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Austrian artist Daniel Domig on November 2nd, 2024. These Mythical Bones is Domig’s first solo presentation of his work in Asia. The work will comprise a body of new paintings, a site-specific installation of five large-scale diptychs, and video works, etc. Spanning over twenty years of painting, Domig constantly uses the body as the subject and medium. The “Bones” of the exhibition title underscores, based on the artist’s creative context, the survival of human beings underneath the fleshes, the parts of our lives that are hardened beyond life and death, yet fragilely intertwined and dependent on each other. The intrinsic tension and distortion of bones, the contact, superposition, the fusion of fleshes, and the depiction of blood vessels, organs, and macroscopic spots reveal the fragile and fiery microcosm under the skin. Carrying on the spirit and aesthetic of Francis Bacon, in the suspended time and space beneath the artist’s brushstrokes, the intimacy and pain of the human torso, lust, and absurdity are condensed in a thin, timeless membrane.
In its underscore on the sensations of the body and the invention and tension generated by its introspection and extrospection, Domig’s open-ended approach elides sketching or underpainting. This approach is a matter of touch and vision simultaneously, a subtle trace of a momentary experience that transcends time and space. Wet and dry contours, bright and melancholic tones, expressionist brushstrokes, and concern for fluidity and transparency are all intently related to the sense of body volume. The blurring concealment of figure and ground, figurative and abstract, as if the skin and pigment transformed into membranes. Thus, a multilayered, co-constructive relationship has been formed between bodies.
In painting such as How to Narrate Without a Protagonist (2023), presents a fusion of translucent blocks of color breaching the outline of the torso, revealing the contingency and plasticity of the body, as well as its interdependence. In Metaphors, Organs and Faces in Between (2024), the reinforcement on boundaries convey a certain impediment to mobility, as if the body and face are creating a swollen tension, yet each is bound in membranes. In A Gaze so close I can feel it on my Skin (2024), the distorted seeing angle causes a subtle and uncanny split in the skull, which maps both an internal state of mind and the pain of existentialism that cannot be bridged to the world beyond. In Domig’s paradoxical view of existence, recognizing people as all flesh and blood is the only hope for transcendence.
The exhibition also features a new site-specific installation that spans the exhibition space. Producing a temporary wooden structure signifies both abstract skeletal elements from paintings to construct sculptural works, and each piece within a connection towards his opened-end exploration of the processes, and infuses the spirit of the studio into the white box space. Five life-size diptychs lurk in the violence between embodiment and transcendence, the foreground on vascular lines, blocky bones, and dotted patterns seem to break down the body into decorative surfaces while simultaneously alienating and activating it. The superimposition and growth of the two paintings is a new exploration for the artist, in contrast with the bottom works, the upper pieces reveal concise, precise, and playful. The artist reaffirms the freedom and openness of the creative process and the courage to show vulnerability when it may fail, which is complemented by a quote from Samuel Beckett as “Theatre of the Absurd” who deeply influenced Domig, “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
About the Artist
Daniel Domig explores social factors and building relationships as an aspect of the human condition through painting archetypal forms and paradigmatic figures. Metaphorically as well as literally, he is trying to discover where one person starts and another begins. Primarily, he depicts the human body in his work, but is aware of the treacherousness of figuration. As painting is both illustrative and narrative, it elevates the image to an object that it supposedly illustrates… he creates the “presence” of a figure, a visual feeling or visual aura which is very conscious in the reception of the viewer, without using obvious forms to bring it into existence.
Daniel Domig was born in 1983 in Vancouver, Canada. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria. Daniel studied Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria, where he currently lives with his family. He has exhibited widely in Europe, North America and Australia over the past two decades.
Among his solo and group shows: Stranger Family, Chalk Horse Gallery, SYDNEY; Where Hopes Infest, Diana Lowenstein Gallery, Miami; The Quiet Afterword, Museum Engen, Germany; Matter of a Burning Body, unttld contemporary, Vienna, Austria; The Heart is a Prideful Beast, Warburton Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland ; All Words Were Once Animals, 33 Orchard, NEW YORK, NYC (solo) ; Five Rooms, Austrian Cultural Forum NYC ; Triennale LINZ 1.0, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz, Austria; With All the Things We Build and Make, Thrust Projects, New York. etc.
Daniel’s works are widely collected by art museums & institutions: Collection Horst Köhn; Collection CCF Paris; Joseph Blake Contemporary; SAMMLUNG ESSL Vienna, Austria; Austrian State Collection, Artothek Vienna, Austria; Statecollection Salzburg, Austria; Museum Engen, German; AMC Collezione Coppola, Italy; Galerie Taxis Palais, Innsbruck, Austria; Collections RVC, Brussels/NYC; Sammlung Leopold Museum, Vienna, Austria.
About Reflexion Gallery
REFLEXION is a contemporary art gallery centered on artists and driven by art. Established in 2024, the gallery is in an iconic Bauhaus building, built in 1950, in 798 Art District, with over 200 sq.m. of exhibition area. REFLEXION is a way we perceive the world and is the pulse that vibrates and explores how space and art flow along our inner landscape to set new boundaries. Within this distant yet constant pulse, we wait, collect those tiny vibrations, and savor the ringing sounds from deep down. We record the bright and colorful multi-facet refractions of minds, the thrilling expressions and creations, and the bold but measured thinking.
