Danny Avidan

Abstract Painting of Body Forms, Contemporary, 100x80 cm, New Danny Avidan

2025

Danny Avidan’s paintings explore the tension between form and formlessness, using it as a way to reflect on the body and the creative process. His expressive gestures continuously attempt to shape solid figures, which emerge and dissolve back into their surroundings. These figures act as a self-portrait—reflecting the artist’s own actions. Like the painter, they are always trying to release something from within in a desperate attempt to become more than they are. They ooze, spit, fragment, and melt, breaking through the skin of paint into backgrounds filled with watery, thick, and scarred whites. Avidan’s work is driven by action and process. He begins each painting directly on the canvas. The scene takes shape intuitively, guided by the movement of his body and the natural flow of the paint. Like his characters, the paintings themselves seek to be more than they are, and in that pursuit, they must be undone. Each scene is erased and re-created over and over, buried beneath layers of plaster, paint, and pencil lines. As the work progresses, each painting becomes a burial ground for older images, from which new forms can be reborn. This merging of process and subject matter reflects the struggle to transcend limitations, with Avidan believing that painting can serve as a path toward overcoming finitude. His work is deeply influenced by his studies in mythology and comparative religion, which he sees as gateways to the collective unconscious. These themes align with Avidan’s view of art as a response to the inability to accept the world as it is and the struggle against the limitations of the mortal condition. Drawing from art history and myth, he finds stories and compositions that resonate with these ideas and uses them to guide his work. From Cadmus sowing the dragon’s teeth, triggering a cycle of violence and exile, to the Hindu myth of Kshira Sagara, the primordial sea of milk from which the world emerged in an act of cosmic churning, these narratives shape and inform his artistic vision.