Dan Feldman is an award winning Artist and designer who has lived and worked in the Hudson Valley of New York since 1985. Dan’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and is featured in numerous private collections. Dan is a graduate of the world-renowned MFA Metals program at SUNY New Paltz. In addition to his ongoing series of metal sculptures, Dan is currently working on “Pretty Lethal Things,” a series of wood pieces based on traditional hunting bows, “Famous Last Words,” a series of paintings exploring nature and mortality, “40 Nights,” a series of mixed media works using mattress surfaces and bedsprings as a platform to explore “things that go bump in the night.” His most ambitious work to date is “Tango Mortii,” a steel sculpture which explores the relationship of the musical and dance genre of Tango with the death camps of the holocaust. It is part of a larger series inspired by the life of the artist’s mother who was a holocaust survivor. Mr. Feldman refers to Tango Mortii as “his Guernica.”
“The overarching goal of my work is to visually express the transmutation of matter into spirit. Whether through the ennoblement of the commonplace, the wedding of the sacred and the profane, or the simple gesture of a drawn line; it is about creating something connected to source where before there was only raw material and empty space.”
“The observation of nature figures prominently in my work. In particular I am interested in the unfolding process that accompanies organic growth and see this as analogous to human inner development. I am also fascinated by grafting as a means to combine disparate elements into a new whole that maintains the individual parts. I see this as analogous to human relationships, and personal transformation.”
“Aesthetically, I want my work to be beautiful, even in the cases where it is simultaneously fraught with danger. I seek to heavily exploit the formal qualities available to me by way of composition, technique and materials, to achieve this end. This is important both for the sake of pleasure and as a point of access – a lure as it may be.”