Daniel Turner (artist)
Daniel Turner (born July 22, 1983) is an American artist based in New York City. His media include sculpture, photography, video and drawing.
Daniel Turner
Early life and work[edit]
Daniel Turner studied painting and printmaking at Norfolk State University and received a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute.[1] Turner worked in construction and demolition before being employed as a security guard at The New Museum in New York City.[2] He was hospitalized several times for psychosis resulting in an action titled, Burning an Entire Body of Work (2006)[3][4] in which he burned all previous paintings to date.[5] Turner now works primarily in sculpture often involving the creation or transformation of materials, objects and environments into architectural or ephemeral forms. His sculptures are often characterized by a specific response to site[6] under a controlled set of processes. This approach has enabled Turner to base form on transposition, preserving a sensory link to geographical locations, cultural associations and human contact. These elements are present in works where an entire waiting room is cast into a series of solid bars,[7] a former psychiatric facility burnished to a darkened stain against a wall,[8] or a cafeteria dissolved[9] across the expanse of a floor.[10] In 2019, Turner extracted one metric ton of hospital beds from The Vinnitsa Regional Psychoneurological Hospital in Vinnitsa Ukraine which were archived, melted and recast into two solid forms.[1][2] Archived 2022-03-04 at the Wayback Machine. For his solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Basel (2022), the artist extracted elements from three sites in the Basel region that triangulate between architecture, the pharmaceutical industry, and psychology.[11] These materials included several tons of heating radiators and oil tanks which the artist removed from the interiors of the chemical plant BASF, the pharmaceutical labs of Novartis, and former psychiatric facility Holdenweild.[12] Material excavated from each of the three sites were melted into minimal forms and burnished into the surface of large scale works on canvas.[13] [14][15]
Personal life[edit]
Turner is married to fellow artist Rita Ackermann.[61][62]