Employing references to the natural world while speaking to hardships, resilience, and freedom, Daniel Gibson’s paintings explore a lexicon of symbols that relate to his familial past and his identity as a Mexican-American. Growing up along the California border with Mexico, Gibson witnessed the harsh realities of migration to America at an early age. In an effort to face the bleak nature of these grueling journeys, he turned to his imagination – often reshaping reality with fantasy. As a painter, Gibson brings to life the surreal narratives that captivated him as a child, presenting memories and family stories from the point of view of his earliest years anew.
Gibson is largely a self-taught artist and has developed his visual language and painting process through intuition and imagination. Shifting between the genres of portraiture, landscape, and still life, Gibson’s surrealistic scenes demonstrate an adoration for nature. Desert landscapes are populated with generously painted lush flowers that often take on an anthropomorphized quality. Gibson revitalizes the world around him in painting, reverently returning to familiar symbols such as flowers, butterflies, figures, desert mountains, beaches, and seas. For the artist, his works are as much autobiographical as they are collective stories that document moments of struggle and celebration that would otherwise be lost to time.
Gibson has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Almine Rech, New York; New Image Art, Los Angeles; Ochi Projects, Los Angeles; LAX Art, Los Angeles; and Mexicali Rose, Baja. Recent group exhibitions include Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; The Pit, Los Angeles; Bozo Mag, Los Angeles; and BBQLA, Los Angeles.
[excerpted from Shulamit Nazarian website: www.shulamitnazarian.com]
