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Daniel Zeller
Speculative Symbiosis
2009
Ink and acrylic on paper
13.5 x 11 inches
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 nown for his intricately detailed biomorphic ink drawings, Daniel Zeller has received international attention and acclaim. Born in 1965 in San Rafael, California, Zeller moved to the outskirts of New Haven, New England, at a young age. Zeller received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Connecticut, where he came to focus on sculpture. He followed this with graduate study, completing a Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts. After graduating, Zeller moved to DUMBO in New York, to further his art career. It was there that Zeller shifted his focus from sculpture to drawing. Zeller’s work has been collected by notable institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles. Recognition for his work has also come through various awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a Civitella Ranieri fellowship and an invitation to join the Artist Pension Trust. Currently living and working in Brooklyn, New York, Zeller is represented internationally by Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn and Leipzig, the Daniel Weinberg Gallery in Los Angeles, G-Module in Paris, and Michel Soskine Inc. in Madrid.
Art Interview: You were born in San Rafael, California in 1965. Did you grow up there as well?
Daniel Zeller: I don’t really remember California that much because we moved away to Connecticut when I was four. My dad got a position at Yale University as a professor of physics. He does high-energy particle research - pretty much beyond my comprehension. My mother had a number of different jobs and ended up working for a cardiologist.
Art Interview: Did you spend much time at Yale since your father works there?
Daniel Zeller: No, I didn’t really spend much time at Yale because we were actually living just outside of New Haven, in a more suburban, almost rural, area. So, my earliest memories are from the woods. Most of my time was spent riding a bike around in the hills, playing in the woods, and going to school.
Art Interview: Since your parents came from an academic background were they supportive of your desire to become an artist?
Daniel Zeller: Yes, they were encouraging. My parents were born and raised in California and had a very relaxed attitude; I was raised in New England, but by Californians. They just wanted their children to be happy, so they were always supportive of what we wanted to do.
Art Interview: Why did you choose to study art?
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Daniel Zeller
Untitled Undergraduate Sculpture
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Daniel Zeller: I didn’t always know I wanted to be an artist; I more or less fell into it. I always doodled in my notebooks during class, but I hadn’t given any thought to art as a career path until I went to the University of Connecticut and had to pick a Major. I picked Fine Art because that was the one thing that I enjoyed doing; I liked to draw so I started off studying graphic design.
Art Interview: Were you working while you were studying for your Bachelor of Fine Arts?
Daniel Zeller: I was just studying and working in one of the dining halls for free food, also I worked during my summer holidays. I received some assistance from a Yale scholarship program that supports the faculty’s children. They paid approximately half my tuition. The University of Connecticut is a State University so it was really cheap in the early eighties. My tuition cost roughly $1200 a year. I took out a small loan for a few thousand dollars and was living in an apartment for $150 a month with three or four other people. My family also helped out with some money, and that was really all I needed. But after two years I wasn’t too thrilled with studying - so I took a year off and went to Colorado to be a ski bum.
I worked in restaurants in Colorado. I didn’t like restaurant work so I decided to go back to the university to study. When I returned I decided to focus on sculpture for the last two and a half years of my undergraduate study.
Art Interview: You did your Master of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts. Why did you choose that particular school?
Daniel Zeller: I looked at a number of schools in the North East because I wanted to stay around that area. I had a professor at the University of Connecticut who suggested I consider the University of Massachusetts, which was where he had studied. The UMASS Master of Fine Arts degree had a three-year program, which I found appealing. I went to the campus and was impressed with their sculpture facilities. In addition to offering all of their graduate students studios they also gave me a full tuition scholarship, a small stipend and the opportunity to teach a class every semester. I was not just helping a professor; I actually got to teach the class. This meant that when I came out of grad school I had teaching experience and virtually no debt.
Art Interview: Did any of the faculty members influence your creativity or assist you in your career?
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Daniel Zeller
Passive Machine
Mixed media |
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Daniel Zeller: Yes, although as in most graduate programs they chose students who already had direction in their work, so they gave us a lot of freedom to go our own way. The sculpture faculty included Jerry Kearns, Pat Lasch, Dale Schlappi, John Townsend and Robert Mallary. They each had certain strengths and some were very helpful with career advice.
I was making structures out of different materials. I wrapped them with fabric and sewed cavities out of the fabric. I then cast either concrete or plaster into these to get a cushioned tension in the fabric. When the concrete or plaster set I would take the fabric off and end up with a strange thing that looked somewhat like a pillow. My sculptures were biomorphic and had skeletal structures. My thesis piece was a little more architectural because I didn’t use a casting technique. It was a giant tent shaped dome made of stretched fabric, which took me around four months to make.
In 1993 when I moved to New York City I still had an interest in continuing to work that way, but the architecture and the scale of everything there overwhelmed me. I realized it was ridiculous to compete with the architectural forms there.
Art Interview: Did you have any contacts when you moved to New York City?
Daniel Zeller: I had a few. I moved to New York with two friends from grad school one of whom was familiar with the city. I also got to know some people through a program called New York Professional Outreach Program, which Jerry Kearns runs at UMASS. NYPOP is intended to be an introduction to the New York art world and we visited artists, curators and other people involved in the art scene. I found the program to be really beneficial because we got to see professional artists working in their studios and talk to them in a very personal way. This took away some of the mystique and intimidation that I initially felt from the thought of breaking into the art world in New York.
Art Interview: Did you set up a studio in New York straight away?
Daniel Zeller: Yes we found space in DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass). Back then it was quite cheap. The three of us shared an apartment and we rented a separate 1500 square foot studio space. I had about 500 square feet to work in but I didn’t particularly like the space. It was in an old building that had a crumbling ceiling and there was not much light.
Art Interview: What were you doing to financially support yourself in New York?
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Daniel Zeller
Untitled
Graphite on panel
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Daniel Zeller: The first job I had in New York was in construction - hanging sheetrock. My next job was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art working as a security guard. I did that for five months, which was a good way to see the museum, but later I ended up working in construction again. Eventually I ended up working seven or eight years for a sculptor. We made prototypes that were sent off to China where they were mass-produced. I did a lot of casting, modeling, mold-making and finishing of models.
Art Interview: Were you able to produce a sufficient amount of your own drawings during this time?
Daniel Zeller: I wasn’t able to produce as much as I would have liked. My intent was to continue sculpting but I was working forty or fifty hours a week to pay the bills and I just did not have a lot of time to make art. I was only able to spend around twenty hours a week in my studio. Under those conditions making a sculpture would have taken me a whole year. The only way I could make any progress was to draw whenever I could. With drawing, I could put in a few hours here and there and I would have the sense that I was achieving something. I made art in the evenings after my job and on the weekends. But I started to get really excited by the drawings I was producing. I was thinking three-dimensionally on paper and it felt as if I were still making sculptures. I could do one or two a week and I felt that I was making progress because the drawings were evolving.
Art Interview: Did you find the transition between sculpture and drawing to be smooth, or was it rather abrupt?
Daniel Zeller: You could say I found the transition to be like stepping backwards. I had always drawn, even when I was a child I consistently drew. It was just something I always did and something I enjoyed doing. Later I drew preparatory sketches for my sculptures, but I also doodled which was a subconscious way for me to work. When I moved to New York and had practically stopped sculpting it was natural for me to continue drawing. It didn’t feel like I had to, I just began to focus on it. Looking back it is almost as if sculpture was a diversion from drawing. I hadn’t really thought of it as an end point in itself. When I started sculpting I didn’t think it would be possible to make a living from drawings.
Art Interview: When you moved to New York in 1993 were you able to easily find exhibition space immediately?
Daniel Zeller: It took a while. In the beginning I did group shows here and there. Through NYPOP I was introduced to the people at Exit Art and I was in their first show entitled Fever in their Manhattan space on Broadway. They looked through my drawings, selected one to exhibit and after that we kept in touch. One of the gallery’s missions is to create exposure for emerging artists. I was in another group show entitled Wild at Exit Art in 1999. Between those two exhibitions I was mostly involved in small, local group shows.
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Daniel Zeller
Ferment
2003
Ink and acrylic on paper
13.5 x 11 inches
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Art Interview: How did you meet Joe Amrhein, the director of the Pierogi Gallery?
Daniel Zeller: I heard about Pierogi Gallery through Howard Kalish, the sculptor that I was working for at the time. He was based several blocks from the gallery. This was around the time when the gallery had just opened and Joe was beginning to expand the flat files. But I was too shy to just go and approach somebody out of the blue, so I didn’t.
I met Joe later when I was in the Wild show at Exit Art in 1999. Joe invited me to show him more of my work and I ended up showing him a pile of drawings. Joe picked out some drawings to put in his flat files, which at that stage were rolling along quite well. After that day I didn’t hear back from him for another year or so.
In 2000 Joe curated a mini show at his gallery called Superduper New York. He used approximately eighty works from the flat files and crammed them all together salon style. I had a small drawing within that mass that caught the eye of the art dealer, Michel Soskine.
Shortly after that show, Joe exhibited four or five of my drawings in an ‘artist of the week’ slot, which generated a good degree of interest.
The artist Kim Kimball got a write up from Holland Cotter in The New York Times for a show called Enthusiasm that he did at Pierogi gallery. In the last paragraph of that review Cotter actually gave me a nice mention. Shortly after that Joe offered me a solo show in the Spring of 2001. I also work with Daniel Weinberg in Los Angles, and Michel Soskine in Madrid. I am working with Jeff Gleich at g-module in Paris, but he is currently in the process of looking for a new space, so I haven’t shown there in a while.
Art Interview: In 2001 you received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. How did that come about?
Daniel Zeller: It seems that I received a letter that I had been nominated for the grant, but at the time I didn’t expect that I would get it, so I almost didn’t apply. David Krepfle, who had received a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant several years earlier, encouraged me to apply anyway, and I’m glad for it. He was aware of my work because we lived in the same building. I was starting to get more exposure for my artwork by that time. Receiving the grant meant that I had enough money to support myself for a year
Art Interview: Were you able to dedicate more time to your artwork as a result of the grant?
Daniel Zeller: Yes, absolutely. It created the possibility for me to work on a much larger scale and to really focus on the work. It was really fortunate timing, near to my first solo show at Pierogi Gallery and I hadn’t yet been making much from the drawings.
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Daniel Zeller
Constriction,
2000
Ink on paper
24 x 19 inches
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Art Interview: How long did it take you before you started making money with your artwork?
Daniel Zeller: About eight years after moving to New York, which I think is pretty fortunate. I participated in roughly twenty group shows before I had my first solo show at Pierogi Gallery. The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant combined with works Joe was able to sell from the show provided me with an income and some stability. At this point, Michel Soskine was also in New York and he bought some work straight from my studio. All these opportunities seemed to come at the same time; I quickly had enough money to cushion myself and could quit my day job to focus on my artwork. I thought that even if I could only dedicate myself full time to art for six months, before having to get another job, that would be fine. Luckily, I managed to continue making a living from my artwork.
Art Interview: Were you surprised that you could make a living from drawings?
Daniel Zeller: I was actually very surprised. I was looking at what was out there in the galleries and museums and I saw that there was a place for the work I was doing. All that was fine and well, but getting the work out there is a whole other thing.
The problem is that you do not get much feedback until you can get people interested in your work; all the feedback you have to go on comes from your friends and fellow artists. It was hard for me to truly believe people would buy pieces of paper with marks on them, but there is a market for it. I feel really, really fell fortunate to be able to draw and to make a living from it. I am not buying a Ferrari, but I am paying the bills.
Art Interview: In 2005 you joined the Artist Pension Trust and then, in 2007, you were awarded a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.
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Daniel Zeller
Internalized Connectivity
2007
Ink and acrylic on paper
13.5 x 11 inches
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Daniel Zeller: The Artist Pension Trust manages artworks and operates as a retirement fund for artists. They take a certain amount of an artist’s work and sell it upon the advice of a committee. The Artist Pension Trust keeps 20 percent of sales for administrative costs, the artist receives 40 percent and the remaining 40 percent goes to a communal pool. In a way, the trust is almost like having another dealer; their goal is to help artists’ careers.
Art Interview: What was your fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation like?
Daniel Zeller: They provided me with a residency in Umbria, Italy, in a fantastic old castle. Ursula Corning, who spent her summers at the fifteenth century Civitella Ranieri castle, founded the fellowship. Corning constantly had writers, artists and musicians over and really enjoyed the creative atmosphere it fostered; she enjoyed it so much that she established the Civitella Ranieri Foundation to continue her work. The foundation oversees the fellowship program, which hosts artists for a period of six weeks in the castle. My time in Umbria was great. I was there with 9 others, including artists, writers, and musicians. We were each provided with studio space, all of our meals, and there were even several cars there for anyone who wanted to go exploring.
Art Interview: How did you start exhibiting internationally?
Daniel Zeller: I would say it all came about through Pierogi Gallery, because that is where most of my dealers discovered my work. Michel Soskine saw my work at Pierogi when he was in New York. He then moved to France and subsequently to Madrid, where he opened a gallery. It worked in a similar way with g-Module; Jeff Gleich had started running a little space called Sixth@Prince in New York. He then moved to Paris and opened a space there. Daniel Weinberg also saw my work at Pierogi when he was visiting New York, which is how I began working with him.
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Daniel Zeller
Alternate Interior
2005
Ink and acrylic on paper
16.5 x 14 inches
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Art Interview: When was your first museum exhibition?
Daniel Zeller: In 2001 I exhibited at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin and I had an exhibition at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock around the same time. I also exhibited at P.S.1. in their Greater New York show in 2005.
Art Interview: How did you feel when you first exhibited in a museum?
Daniel Zeller: It felt great, I hadn’t really ever imagined it would be possible, and it meant that my work would reach a broader audience. I was also very exited to have my first solo show at a gallery, up until then I had not even considered the possibility of showing in museums. I really just wanted to get my work out so people could see it. My work had been shown in group-shows, but I wanted to show an entire body of work.
Having my work in museums seems to have led to independent curators that are not affiliated with commercial galleries taking note and the museums started collecting my work for their permanent collections around 2003.
Art Interview: Did Joe Amrhein play a role in that progression?
This oral history transcript is the result of a digitally recorded interview with Daniel Zeller on November 6, 2009. The interview took place over the telephone between Berlin, Germany and New York, New York, USA. Brendan Davis conducted this interview for Art Interview Online Magazine. |
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