Dani Marcel x Fish the Painting

Marcel presents a new series titled ‘Gallery poll’ (2022-2023) for the first time. The small poll cards , decks of which he has been carrying around for months,  asked people a single question: which gallery you think I should be represented by? The replies are individually framed, with frame-sizes based on an arbitrary list of importance of the galleries. Subverting the usual hierarchy between sought-after galleries and dreaming artists, the multi-faceted responses talk as much about the people signing them, and on a larger scale, about the art community of London, as about the desires of the artist who printed them. 

Alongside the cards Marcel also shows a number of small yellow cards, that carry bets, jokes, promises and instructions, loosely based around different modes of artist-audience relationships. Visitors are free to take from these.

Fish the Painting’s video titled ‘frametok’ (2023) observes ideas of the production of art and the artist’s self through a continuous stream of thoughts, mutating topics and ideas into one another, divided only by abrupt and nonsensical cuts familiar from TikTok.  Having started out in the music industry running his own labels in Vienna and later shifting to a gallery context, Fish’s humour and wit serves as a bridge to a critical understanding of the distribution of culture at large.

In a landscape populated by major institutions and galleries, and self-publishing, hustle-cultured, self-cultivating artists, Fish’s work show a satirical, and realer-than-real, progression from self-understanding, to self-management, on to doing everything yourself, so much, that, ultimately, you literally become your own painting.

Fish the Painting is a Vienna-based artist working in analogue and digital performance, sculpture and video. His layered practice explores social topics through the materials of linen and stretcher bars.  Recent shows and fairs include Art Austria, Vienna, Parallel, Vienna, IMC5533, Istanbul and Burggasse 21, Vienna amongst others.

Dani Marcel is a London-based artist. His work includes constructed situations, names, paintings objects and proposals with undetermined endings, in the form of an autobiographical conceptualism.  His work has been shown in project spaces and shows in Sadie Coles HQ, London, South London Gallery, London, O’Flaherty’s NYC and Fold Gallery, London amongst others.