Danny Fox: A Spoon With The Bread Knife

Strong women, men on horse back – racing to their future or escaping their past, classic fruit bowls, a glass of red wine – half empty or full, depending on current mood and perspective, bad bananas, a specific red color borrowed from an old colleague and spoons are reoccurring elements in Danny Fox’s new body of work A Spoon With The Bread Knife. The title is a reference to English rhyming slang where the bread knife translates to wife and spoon to cuddle.

Fox’s work is full of references, conversations and possible translations. In his paintings, he engages a rich history of both figuration and abstraction. He does this with the natural grace and conviction that comes from hard work and experience. Painting like there is no tomorrow. Painting like there is nothing else but painting. He walks into a bar and strikes up a conversation with Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh and Basquiat. He enters the painter’s cave to continue the development of motifs that seem as long as human history. Humanity.

Humanity, for better or worse, is a theme in Fox’s work from the tough women of Down Town Los Angeles that surrounds him in his daily life in the studio on Skid Row to the history of Europe as a raging colonizing colossus. Fox’s work is informed by both personal and general observations. Many of the new paintings feature prominent female leads like the large canvas The Women Are Angry And We Pretend Not To Know Why (244 x 305 cm). Many of the men in Fox’s paintings are riding horses, this beautiful potent creature that has carried man to victory and grave. In No Reward Unpunished (61 x 76 cm) two riders are galloping for the Guinness. The men often have an empathetic tragic feel in Fox’s work, while the women feel empowered and secure. Tragedy and genocide are translated into beautiful fragmented abstraction in the two large red paintings Eraser (Leopold In The Congo) (183 x 213 cm) and Rubber (Leopold In The Congo) (183 x 213 cm). Danny Fox’s works are compelling, they engage you in conversation, they seem both urgent, personal and universal. The paintings are bold and brave while equally fragile and wry. On a tightrope between greatness and elegant disaster.

Danny Fox born 1986 in St Ives, England, currently lives and works in Los Angeles, America.
Fox has recently exhibited at S/2 Sotheby’s in Los Angeles (2016) and New York (2016) and Redfern Gallery in London (2015). A new publication will be available on the occasion of A Spoon With The Bread Knife.

Kilde:  V1 Gallery