Daniel Gibson: Chasing the Black Bird

Nazarian / Curcio is pleased to present Chasing the Black Bird, a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Gibson. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.

Daniel Gibson has long explored the natural world in his paintings as a means to address notions of hardship, resilience, and freedom. In opposition to the harsh desert landscape of his youth, the artist renders his paintings as lush botanical spaces full of thriving flora and fauna, and loaded with a symbology that connects to his Mexican-American heritage. At an early age, Gibson witnessed the bleak realities of migration to the United States from the California border with Mexico. To cope with what he knew would be a near impossible journey for so many, he turned to his imagination, conjuring a bountiful landscape that could support these weary migrants, often envisioning each individual as a flower populating this new land. These childhood memories, dreams, and fantasies have come to be the root of his artistic practice. 

The exhibition’s title, Chasing the Black Bird, is a reference to the artist’s decades-long daily meditation practice. During his painting process, Gibson often conjures a visual mantra, repeatedly envisioning a blackbird in flight, moving through the plane of the canvas. Chasing this visual in his mind, the artist transcribes the bird's path as lines on his canvas, creating the start of his composition. This intuitive process leads to an organic unfolding of forms that collapse the figure-ground relationship, challenging traditional spatial hierarchies, and creating a path for his established lexicon of symbols.

The foundation of these newest paintings are rooted in Gibson’s drawing practice, making use of near continuous black lines to define his compositions. While retaining a representational quality, the works in Chasing the Black Bird lean further towards abstraction, creating a dynamic interplay between form and narrative. The relationship between figure and ground has become more flattened and stacked, with flowers emerging monumentally in the foreground and the deep space of the land stacked like geological strata. The artist’s color palette has also shifted to deep blues, purples and greens, punctuated with coral, yellow, and white, all separated from a decisively rendered black line.   

Influences from American artists Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley can be seen in the artist's use of color, texture, and organization of space, while the graphic nature of his line and form references German Expressionism. As he navigates these influences, Gibson imbues his compositions with an emotional weight and deep reverence for the cyclical nature of life and the human experience, reflecting on his earliest years along the border. 

Chasing the Black Bird is a testament to Gibson's continued evolution as an artist, highlighting his commitment to pushing the visual boundaries of his practice, while remaining deeply connected to the genre of landscape painting as a conceptual framework to discuss memory, migration, and the untold stories of those that venture into the United States in search of a better future.