Marais, Paris
Daniel Blumberg
Silverpoint Drawings
Balice HertlingDaniel Blumberg (b. 1990, London) is an artist and composer whose practice operates across drawing, songwriting, improvisation and sound. His drawings, produced primarily in silverpoint, are ostensibly figurative and centred on the human presence, yet they frequently destabilise the coherence of the body through distortion, fragmentation, and the introduction of geometric or abstract elements. At times, a single sheet appears to contain multiple, unstable viewpoints or residual traces of different figures, as if the image were unfolding rather than fixed. Across the series, individual drawings do not operate in isolation but resonate collectively, as part of a larger, evolving composition. Silverpoint - a demanding and historically codified technique associated with precision and control - is reactivated by Blumberg as an exploratory, process driven medium. The surface, which retains every mark without erasure, becomes a site of accumulation where form emerges through variations in pressure, density, and repetition. This method produces images that appear provisional, layered, and open ended, foregrounding drawing as a temporal and durational process. While the act of mark making may take only seconds, the silverpoint line evolves over time through oxidation. Exposure to air, humidity, and incidental contact - oils from the hand, traces of the surrounding environment - gradually alters the surface, deepening and shifting the tonal register of the image over weeks or months. In this sense the drawing is not fixed at the moment of its making but remains in a state of ongoing transformation until it reaches a point of final stability, after which silverpoint becomes one of the most archival and enduring of drawing media. Blumberg’s work has been exhibited at the Triennale di Milano, ICA London, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, and the Bourse de Commerce in Paris. Alongside his visual art, Blumberg has released several solo albums on Mute and composed music for films including Sotto le Nuvole (Pompei: Below The Clouds) and The Brutalist, for which he received the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2025. —Emma Rosi Emma Rosi (b. 1999) is an art history graduate. She holds two Master’s degrees from the The Courtauld Institute of Art, focusing on the socio cultural contexts shaping contemporary art in New York (1970s–1990s) and on Painting materials and techniques from 1945 to the present.