Daisy Sheff

Using an untamed palette of colours and materials, Daisy Sheff’s practice manifests as a vital quest into the depths of painting and its power for communion. Incorporating references to literature, myth, fairy tales, and the everyday, Sheff constructs saturated, densely layered compositions where characters, animals, and abstractions cohabit joyfully. Whether a reclining figure, a hand poised above a letter, a plate of food, a bouquet, a dog, or a host of faces, the artist captures scenes of convalescence, domestic rituals, or pastoral reverie, all arising from maximalist backdrops of swirling colour, dotted with beads, glitter, and collage.

Swathed in an ocean of influences, Sheff’s painterly practice engages with art historical movements ranging from the Nabis to the Bay Area Figurative movement, while maintaining a distinctly contemporary and unique stance. Indeed, beyond their visual density, the works hold a characteristic philosophical charge: each canvas is infused with a vitalist sensibility, suggesting that all things, from a butterfly to a book, from a mountain to a dog, may pulse with the same life force. Beneath the ornamental surfaces of Sheff’s paintings lies a meditation on the porous border between the human and the animal, the real and the imagined, the visible and the invisible. Across recent sculptural works, she extends her vocabulary into three dimensions, giving form to the canines and dancers that populate her canvases. Using materials taken both from the everyday and sculptural tradition, Sheff combines pipe cleaners, fabric, wire, felt, pom poms, string, ceramic, and concrete to create figures that vibrate with her signature maximalism and challenge preconceptions of craft versus high art.