Dallas Art Fair: Daniel Gibson

Shulamit Nazarian is pleased to present new works by Los Angeles-based artist Daniel Gibson for the 2023 edition of the Dallas Art Fair.  

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, he 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, reshaping reality with fantasy by introducing dreamlike guardians into the desert landscape. Conjuring people from his past as a means to examine the present, Gibson uses memories to create dream-like narratives that explore themes of identity and migration. 

Using the desert landscapes and seasides of Southern and Baja California as their fertile ground, his surrealistic scenes are populated with lush flora that take on an anthropomorphic quality. Butterflies, flowers, ocotillos, and desert mountains become proxies for the people navigating the desert, visualizing the narratives of migration without drawing on essentialist tropes. 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.

Daniel Gibson (b. 1977 Yuma, AZ; Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; Almine Rech, New York and Paris; Brant Timonier, Palm Beach, FL; New Image Art, Los Angeles, CA; Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, CA; LAX Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Mexicali Rose, Baja, Mexico. Recent group exhibitions include MUSEA K11, Hong Kong; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, CA; The Pit, Los Angeles, CA; Bozo Mag, Los Angeles, CA; and BBQLA, Los Angeles, CA. His works have been written about by WideWalls, Juxtapoz, and the Brooklyn Rail and are in the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL.