Melanie Daniel | Yours To Inherit

Melanie Daniel | Yours To Inherit

Exhibition Dates October15 – December 15, 2025

Reception Saturday, November 1st 3-5pm

Maybaum Gallery is pleased to present Yours To Inherit, a solo exhibition by Canadian born and Israel based artist Melanie Daniel. In Daniel’s psychedelic, richly-textured landscapes, figures inhabit otherworldly ecosystems in which nature runs riot. She draws on mythology, folklore, and personal association to create fantastical vistas that hint at narratives just beyond our grasp. Her unnatural palette, dense areas of vibrating pattern, and skewed perspectives underscore the uneasy relationship between the subjects and their environment. Daniel’s big, brash, and strangely beautiful works are cautionary yet hopeful.

From Yours To Inherit unveils imagined pictures of this world with an open ended sense of self discovery. Themes or where land meets water allude to the last place one might reach before a new frontier. Symbols such as boats and shamans indicate a transient, nomadic and perhaps fleeing nature to the loose narratives presented in this new body of paintings. A kinetic energy created by the linear markings and floating planes lends itself to an itinerant almost de-rooted state in seeking refuge perhaps subconsciously through the fluidity of movement throughout each painting. As an artist, Daniel is like a sieve processing so much information from today’s current context with her unique perspectives having grown up within Canada’s social culture and now surviving in her home of many years with her family in Israel.

Using shadows of human figures often as secondary presences to the animal and plant kingdom, Daniel’s paintings bring into question the hierarchy that has been established by civilization. Great value is placed on the survival of these kingdoms while positioning human figures in roles of curiosity. Her compositions pull from 19th century paintings while her treatment of space embraces some of Matisse’s flat planes in conjunction with a lushness created by translucent layers of oil paint juxtaposed with details.

Melanie Daniel‘s psychedelic, unnatural palette, dense areas of vibrating pattern, and skewed perspectives underscore an uncanny relationship between the subjects and their environment. Drawing heavily from the Canadian landscape and her great appetite for the history and language of painting, the landscapes are interjected with areas of delicate stains and washes contrasted with passages of abstract impasto and intricate patterns to achieve a buzzing visual ecosystem. Daniel’s big and strangely beautiful works are cautionary yet hopeful. They show the power of nature, as plants and flowers intermingle with spectres and shadows, and threaten to overrun the canvas and envelop the human presence.

After philosophy and literature studies at UBC and Concordia University, Melanie Daniel completed her MFA at Bezalel Academy in Tel Aviv. Daniel has had numerous exhibitions internationally, including solo exhibitions at Asya Geisberg Gallery, NY; Mindy Solomon Gallery, Miami; Hiro Hiro Artspace, Taipei; the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Michigan; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel;  Galleri Christoffer Egelund, Copenhagen; Chelouche Gallery, Tel Aviv; Ashod Museum of Art, Israel; Shulamit Gallery, Los Angeles; and Kelowna Art Gallery, British Colulmbia, among others. She has received press in publications such as Harper’s Magazine, Border Crossings Magazine, Young Space New York, Maake Magazine, Artnet, Newsweek, Frieze, CBC/Radio Canada, The Huffington Post, Beautiful Decay, and the Artists Magazine. Daniel is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Grant, the 2009 Rappaport Prize for a Young Israeli Painter, a Creative Capital Grant, and the NARS Foundation Residency in New York City. In 2020 she completed a position as the Padnos Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Grand Valley State University, MI.

Maybaum Gallery was founded in San Francisco in 2018 by Christina Maybaum. The gallery represents emerging and mid-career artists with a focus on process-driven work that reveals the artist’s hand. Located in downtown San Francisco, the gallery comprises 2,000 square feet of exhibition space for solo shows as well as additional viewing space for our growing roster of artists. In addition to rotating exhibitions, the gallery provides private art consulting services to meet clients’ unique art needs.