DANIEL
SHAFER
Dániel apprenticed under sculptor/jeweler Sándor Végh in Budapest, Hungary from 1996‐1998. His media was oil‐on‐canvas, plaster, and bronze, and his work focused on exploration of his Transylvanian roots and the meaning of culture in a rapidly changing society. Later while living in Italy, Germany and Japan for several years, he explored musicianship and was active with oil painting and drawing to investigate the meaning of borders. Repatriating to the US via Houston in 2014 allowed him to re‐establish a studio space, where he focused on working in bronze and mixed media sculpture. Those themes questioned the dominance of accepted norms and perceived societal roles in shaping people’s behavior and freedom.
Following a stint in Buffalo’s Linwood Historic District where his focus was creating public art under the theme of “Unity”, Daniel is living in Geneva, NY and builds custom steel bicycles and is studying winemaking.
Their Words Lived On, 2022 (Collagraph)
The work is a gestural venture away from three-dimensional art towards a nuanced graphic that retains the structural feel of sculpture through the use of rhythm, repetition and a relentlessness of color.
The materials employed are a multi-generational travel through time of personal items with a bearing towards universal understanding. The forty year old deerskin, the twenty year old Japanese fabric, the newly opened carton that held Scotch for the holidays, the unsized kitakata paper from Kochi, Japan cached for fifteen years all combine to form a dreamlike landscape of hills, clouds and projectiles lulling the viewer to see something hopeful and to change the course of what could be.
Daniel Shafer
May 17, 2022/Buffalo