Danielle Gottesman
Bio: Danielle Gottesman (b. 1990, London) was raised in both Israel and France, and is now based in New York. She is a multi-media artist with a concentration in sculpture. She has exhibited in the United States and internationally, and is currently a Visual Arts MFA candidate at Columbia University (2022). In 2012, Gottesman earned her BA in Fine Art from Central St Martins in London (UK). She has also completed programs at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna (Austria) and the Chelsea College of Arts in London (UK).
daniellegottesman.com
Instagram: @daniellegottesman
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: I draw inspiration from our innate relationship with physical tools, as well as the development of technical images (such as architectural notations, digital icons, and public information signs).
At Columbia, it was important for me to better understand my fixations as an artist. I discovered that my fixation on simple, broken tools was in fact a fascination with failure, or with how mutation can occur as a response to failure. To explore this further, I limited my current study to standardized, public information symbols. Through the study of standardized images of human figures in particular, I chose to hone in on the ones that represented newborn babies. Such signs exist for instructional use and can be seen in countless locations in the public sphere.
In my work, I delve into universally complex and often unresolved themes of daily life by transforming these standardized images into ambiguous, abstracted objects. These crafted objects intend to be both unsettling and satisfying to the viewer who confronts them. Through this process I aim to bring attention to the daily barrage of instructions we are faced with, and to show how technical images that exist to guide us may help us confront deeper, underlying failures.
The gift of life is thine (48" x 24" x 30", Carved basswood, carved HDU, steel threaded rods and nuts, 2022)
First Year Exhibition
Collecting Rituals: Shrapnel Series
(Photo Etchings, 2021)
Ten images of a single shell fragment, picked up by our neighbors during wartime (2014) and kept by my father in our family home. I captured it there one late afternoon, 6 years later. This object inspired an ongoing collection of shell fragments from various wars I have never known. Such objects are universally collected and often traded online.
