Melanie Daniel
Melanie Daniel
Melanie Daniel was born and currently resides and works in Israel. She is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery of New York.
Her surreal palette and dense areas of vibrating pattern highlight the complex relationship between nature and humanity, warning against harm but offering hope at once. Her large paintings offer both warning and optimism.
Early Life and Education
Melanie Daniel was born in 1972 and came of age during the 1980s, an era characterized by rising global capitalism, political unrest, mass media’s rapid spread around the world, rising wealth disparities, distinctive music and fashion styles and many major art movements – an environment which greatly shaped her early work, which combines abstraction with figuration.
She studied in Jaffa, Israel before traveling back home to Canada. Since then she has held solo exhibitions at Asya Geisberg Gallery of New York; Mindy Solomon Gallery of Miami; Grand Rapids Art Museum; Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv; Angelika Knapper Gallery in Stockholm and Kelowna Art Gallery in British Columbia.
Her paintings depict a future ecosystem that is both captivating and unnerving, featuring ambiguous figures evoking feelings of doom in an inhospitable environment, forging their own Mad-Max DIY solutions against impending doomsday scenarios.
Professional Career
Melanie Daniel’s fear of humanity’s relationship to nature inspired her recent large-scale paintings and works on paper. With their psychedelic palettes and dense areas of vibrating pattern, Melanie Daniel’s paintings evoke a world brought close to collapse through our indifference towards its wellbeing.
Her compositional and formal elements combine to create an lyrical tension between memory and fantasy, reflecting her personal struggle as an immigrant to Israel’s mixed Arab-Jewish city of Jaffa.
She has played roles such as Rose in Two and a Half Men, Shauna on Showtime Yellowjackets, and Norma in Mr. Robot (2022). Additionally, she serves as teaching assistant and Padnos Distinguished Artist-in-Residence at Grand Valley State University.
Achievement and Honors
Melanie Daniel has had numerous exhibitions worldwide, notably solo exhibitions at Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York City and Chelouche Gallery in Los Angeles as well as Shulamit Gallery in Los Angeles and Shulamit Gallery in Europe and Israel.
Her work captures her experience living and working in Israel and the complexities of postcolonialism through various motifs, vivid color palettes and dreamlike settings that confound concrete narratives.
She currently teaches at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan as the Stuart and Barbara Padnos Distinguished Artist-in-Residence. Her students are challenged to rethink their approach to art while she encourages experimentation with various media forms. In addition, she often gives talks on her process and past works.
Personal Life
Melanie has been an outspoken champion for Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT), even after her former husband David Bloom passed away from it in 2008. She shares images of both Daniel McNulty – another passionate DVT advocate – and Melanie on social media to raise awareness.
Her art embodies her anxiety about humanity’s relationship to nature, with vivid color combinations that conjure environmental degradation. Additionally, she integrates cultural motifs from both Canadian landscape painting and traditional Arabic patterns – as well as mixing Canadian landscape style with traditional Arabic patterns into her pieces. Represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York and Chelouche Gallery in Tel Aviv respectively, she currently resides in Jaffa Israel where many of her pieces depict unnerving psychologically charged scenes.
Net Worth
Melanie has made quite the profit off her beautiful curves and beauty over time, earning big bucks in films like Something Wild and Stuart Little 2. Additionally, Melanie charged an attractive fee for roles like Lolita and Bonfire at the Vanities.
Melanie is known to donate both time and money to various humanitarian efforts, most recently helping Children’s Hospital Los Angeles raise money for its new state-of-the-art pediatric inpatient facility.
Melanie boasts a net worth of $40 Million and lives an extravagant lifestyle. She owns multiple properties across the United States and often posts images from her travels via social media accounts.