EXPERTISE
Christine Kunkler,
LDXArtodrome Gallery, Art Historian (BA), Philosopher (MA), Bad Mergentheim, 2023
Daniela Melzig was born in Bielefeld (Germany). In 1999 she obtained a diploma in fine arts and design from the Maastricht University of Applied Sciences (NL). In 2009 she received the European teaching qualification in art and design from the Autonomous University of Eupen (B). Since 2020 she has been taking part in a further training program for interdisciplinary dance mediation at the Academy of Cultural Education Remscheid. She has received numerous art prizes and various grants.
Daniela Melzig is at home in several areas of art: she produces multimedia performances, pictures on glass and graphics. The artist strives for light and transparency in all media, producing the unexpected diffuse as something enigmatic, fleeting. Sometimes she stages herself, but not in order to be recognized as such by the viewer, but to dissolve herself as something fleeting, alien, only shining in the light. The artist questions what seems calculable and rational in the real world: Daniela Melzig leads her audience into a world of the incomprehensible by setting a counterpoint to the calculating world of technology and fast-paced life with her oeuvre. With light and its effects, she takes her audience into the worlds of imagination, the foreign and the past, worlds in which time seems to have stood still and in which everything is nebulously transfigured and different.
Daniela Melzig has been represented by LDXArtodrome Gallery since 2023. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are in numerous collections.
AMSTERDAM WHITNEY GALLERY, NYC-Chelsea Gallery, USA, 2023
"Our distinguished curatorial review committee was greatly impressed by your magnificent oeuvre such as TRANSPARENT WORLDS-LOUISE & DANIELA, which resonates with a profound visual narrative while revealing the invisible in the visible. The spiritual artistic journey you take in your outstanding work was quite impressive and a triumph of personal expression. "CLASSIC MEETS MODERN” generated profound symbolism while reflecting a universal message. Congratulations on your aesthetically pleasing oeuvre, created with a dynamic sense of texture and powerful visceral shapes reverberates. We were enthralled by the emotional quality of "FRENCH ROSE", reflecting her delicate talent and vivid visual intensity of colour. Her compelling "GLASS STORY" conveys her unique artistic vision of capturing the intangible while conveying the essence of capture emotional and physical experience. Our committee recognizes you for your outstanding work with its important visual narrative and emotional connection to human and artistic experience. We are very pleased with your wonderful art and the positive energy of your stellar compositions."
Ruthie Tucker, Executive Director - Curator
Laudation for Daniela Melzig at the opening of the exhibition on February 4th, 2014
Paul Scheerbart (1863-1915) - the well-known philosopher and writer of fantastic literature and draftsman wrote in his imaginative essays on glass architecture:
“No material overcomes matter as much as glass. Of all the substances that we know, it has the most elementary effect. It reflects the sky and the sun, it is like clear water and it has a wealth of possibilities in terms of colours, shapes and character, which really cannot be exhausted and which cannot leave anyone indifferent.”
In doing so, he influenced young architects such as Bruno Taut and inspired many artists around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
And to this day, the attractiveness of glass as a material has increased rapidly in many areas of human culture.
Daniela Melzig, the artist I would like to introduce to you today,
made Paul Scheerbart's words one of the guiding principles of her art.
Glass has fascinated us humans for thousands of years.
Glass is an amorphous substance. Usually, glass is made by melting.
From a thermodynamic perspective, glass is referred to as a frozen, supercooled liquid.
This definition applies to all substances that are melted and cooled quickly enough so that there is not enough time to allow the building blocks to be rearranged into a crystal whose atoms are structured in a strictly ordered manner.
Put simply, the atomic structure of a glass roughly corresponds to that of a liquid. The transformation area is the transition area between melt and solid. The transition from the liquid to the glass state is reversible.
Daniela Melzig's art begins during this relatively short period of time during which glass is transformed from a liquid to a solid state of aggregation, and this period varies from glass type to glass type. As a trained chemical-technical assistant, she masters the material with virtuosity and develops her artistic statements in harmony with the “solid liquid”.
In a fascinating way, she succeeds in depicting the knowledge of the ancient philosophers that everything flows and that the only constant is constant change. She uses the blurriness of aged photographs to make us aware that even the photographic intention of wanting to capture something "forever" is - viewed realistically - doomed to failure.
Blurring and finally faded things make us melancholic at times, but also create space for our individual "head cinema", which starts from our own experiences and memories, interprets the pictures and allows us - initially mostly unconsciously - to reflect on our own personal history and that of our environment.
Daniela Melzig fixes the joyful memory of happy past events, the longing for unreachable, distant places and local landscapes, flowers and portraits in glass, often without a frame, thus strengthening the dissolution of our dream worlds.
However, she captures some scenes in the panes of discarded old wooden window frames and in rusty barn windows.
They offer us further possibilities of interpretation: Pictures similar to this or that might once have been seen through these special frames.
The house and stable they were part of are long gone...
And yet the romantic look back is never without hope for the future.
Kerstin Borchardt, curator