YVES DANA

Egyptian-born and based in Switzerland, Yves Dana has been pursuing his unique practice for almost three decades, since a return trip to Egypt in 1996 altogether transformed his approach to sculpture-making. Working with a variety of stones, which are shipped from countries across the world including Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and Italy, Dana first studies the eccentricities of each block after it arrives in his Lausanne studio. This intense focus on the uniqueness of each stone leads him to develop individual sculptures which enhance the particular qualities of his materials, conjuring an ineffable sense of timelessness in works which are at the same time profoundly sensual and concerned with human touch.

Working tirelessly into the surface of each work, Dana creates furrows, engravings and other markings which appear weathered by imagined elements or read as a kind of unintelligible scripture. In his freestanding sculptures, he pays particular attention to the very top edge of each vertical form, cresting it with a simple motif such as a half ring, ledge, miniature staircase or terrace, which expands the imaginative potential of each work. These subtle references to ancient architectural features have the sculptures take on a new identity as the surviving vestiges of a ruined civilisation. Two individual works both titled ‘Citadelle’, 2024, are almost figurative in their representation of a partly dilapidated structure atop a piece of pink-toned Pakistani travertine.

While Dana’s works are abstract, they often conjure poetic readings. In ‘Apparition’, 2024, Dana works into and polishes different surfaces within the piece to create a range of textures, suggestive of bone marrow or tree bark, emphasising the natural origins of his material. In ‘Pleine Pierre’, 2015, the polychrome sandstone has been chiselled to create a slim opening which reaches almost the height of the sculpture, allowing light to pass through, and resulting in an impression of two figures, paired closely to meet as one.

At moments in the exhibition, it is as if Dana is drawing on the stone. ‘Ainsi la Nuit’, 2024, displays remarkably complex markings which suggest the ridges of a fingerprint, scales of an aquatic creature or waves along a shoreline, while in ‘Pierre de Patience’, 2022, dots and lines appear to twist and writhe across the surface of the sandstone, generating lyrical constellations.

Also included in the exhibition are Dana’s wall-based reliefs, which introduce iron elements in dialogue with pieces of stone or wood, in cleanly linear compositions. A ribbon-like loop of iron might be interrupted by an intersecting piece of driftwood; a shard of iron, tipped with gold leaf, propped against a large tablet of wall-mounted marble. ‘Miroir en miroir’, 2018, combines a semi oval in Sinai white limestone with a corresponding iron wire which both completes and disrupts the shape as a whole.

In this atmospheric and tactile exhibition, visitors encounter a breadth of work in stone by Yves Dana, bringing something of the artist’s workshop studio to Waddington Custot’s London gallery.