Daniel Horowitz’s practice is one of painting, drawing, collage and installation. Through combining realism and surrealist abstraction, he produces works worthy of modern curiosity cabinets. Created following unnatural associations that turn logic or scale upside down, his chimaera express with a creaking humor the fear of our contemporary world, in search of its identity. (...) By re-appropriating well behaved romantic engravings, Daniel Horowitz touches on this taste for the uncanny which inspired certain vocations amongst Safari candidates. His grafted creatures, with disproportionately long necks -- coherent even though “unseen” ever before - give life to our collective symbolic lexicon.

Claude d’Anthenaise, Director Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature

In this body of twenty works on paper commissioned by Claude d’Anthenaise, Director of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, artist, Daniel Horowitz dives into the exercise of pseudo-historical documentation. Retelling a fictive safari expedition, he subverts original eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century artifacts to explore the art of hunting, as a metaphor for man’s quest of self. The objective is to successfully manipulate the image by harnessing the given style and technique of each antique engraving or watercolor, and to confuse the viewer as to what is authentic and what is intervention. By seamlessly integrating the counterfeit historical work back into the permanent collection of the museum among many other genuine artifacts, the exhibition confuses what is “museological objectivation” and “ontological engineering” to cite the philosopher, Vincent Normand. Images that once posed as factual have been ultimately subverted in order to exploit the perceived dissonance between the observer and the observed. Questioning the ontological role of the museum, the exhibition, and the historical artifact all together.