Yves Dana
b. 1959, Switzerland
Yves Dana’s (b.1959, Alexandria, Egypt) sculptures are inspired by ancient Egyptian and Cycladic forms. At the heart of the exhibition, two monolithic sculptures, each over three metres in height, reveal how the artist works on a monumental scale in stone and bronze. These will be accompanied by a further number of freestanding sculptures shown together in a group, and table top pieces which more directly relate to the proportions of the human body.
Dana was born in Egypt but his family were forced to flee Alexandria in 1961 during an expulsion of Jewish people and other minorities from the country. He grew up in Switzerland but returned to Egypt on a six-month trip in 1996 that proved transformational to his practice. Dana started experimenting with limestones and basalts, inspired by the ancient and current history of the country. It was here that the elegant forms of Dana’s upright sculptures found their origins, inspired by the Egyptian felucca – simple, traditional sailboats used in pharaonic times and still in operation today.
For Dana, sculpture-making is purely instinctive; he works directly with the materials without preparatory sketches or maquettes. He sources stone from around the world – limestone from Egypt, France and Turkey, serpentine from Italy, diabase from Germany – and combines innovative carving techniques with traditional tools to create precise planar forms.
There is a deliberate sense of timelessness in Dana’s work; he intentionally erodes the otherwise sleek surface of his sculptures as he describes: ‘I feel more like an archaeologist, looking for meaning in a form once the layers are stripped away. I want these sculptures to feel as if they have emerged from the sands after thousands of years of burial.’