Friedrich Danielis

As a self-taught artist I take liberties and claim the right to be curious - curiosity lets me explore in my paintings, in various ways and ever more extensive groups and cycles of egg-tempera paintings, pastels and gouaches that are essentially love-letters to the senses, what I intend to add to our world as a "parallel nature".

I wish for a world in man´s image and likeness.

For this reason my pictures - never mind how complicated they seem - are intended to be simply beautiful.
Because beauty is and remains, I believe, by far the greatest provocation.




are, in my case, egg-tempera on canvas. This ancient technique allows for making colours directly from pigments, so I make up my own paints.

They, and my pastels and gouaches on paper, are often conceived as groups or cycles that permit a thorough exploration of thematically united blocks of work:

"Mahlereien", a love affair with music; "Danielis Dozen", a set of compositional experiments in the form of variations; "Stretching Exercises", playing with tensions of expansion and stress in a set of well-defined thematic material.

This does not mean a never-ending chain of connected images, but there is undoubtedly a tendency to approach painting as an empirical experiment that leads to series of results.

"Doppelfelix" does this in a set of line drawings (see "BOOKS" and the catalogue of the show "Farbenspiele" of my artists books in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich) in the form of a theme and variations, as do the gouaches of "Cosi fan pochi", coming very close to the transformation of musical variations into painting:

Painting as a design of a world where Imagination alone rules.
Link PAINTINGS





As Artists Books they are an integral part of my work.

Beginning with "Spuren und Pfeiler", the first book in collaboration with Jeremy Adler, by now more than a dozen Artists Books have been produced.
There are two distinct groups:
Books with text by other authors
and books with my own texts.

The book, "Lehnwoerter" ("borrowed words") with various texts (in German), five original drawings and one gouache, was presented at the Vienna Secession.

The catalogue "Farbenspiele, Artists Books by Friedrich Danielis" published by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, contains an extensive survey of my work by Sabine Solf with 30 reproductions in colour.
It can be ordered directly from the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek or, like several other of my publications, from the book-shop of the Vienna Secession.
Link BOOKS