DANIEL M.KRAUSE / CHINA

Daniel M.Krause (born 1964 in Chicago, Illinois, USA) is a bronze sculpture artist that lives and works in Berlin. Prior coming to Germany he lived in China for over thirty years. From 1982 to 1987 Krause studied Microbiology but also Visual Arts with a focus on Studio Sculpture at the University of California, San Diego, USA. In 1988 he enrolled for studying Sculpture at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts (GAFA), Guangzhou, China and received his master’s degree in 1993. From 2006 to 2011 Krause taught Contemporary Metal Fabrication, Contemporary Western Sculpture Theory and 20th Century Sculpture History at the Sculpture department of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. In 2011 the artist and his family moved to Beijing where he gave Studio courses at the Art Institute of the The People’s University of China until 2018. Krause lived in Sydney, Australia from 2018 to 2019 and moved to Berlin, Germany in 2020.

Krause spent the first 12 years of his life in the suburbs of Chicago before his family moved to the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles, USA. At high school he was already interested in stoneware slab sculpture and porcelain. The artist was fascinated by the discovery of the Xi’an Terracotta that highly influenced his figurative sculptures and gave an ignition on his interest in China in general. After high school he entered a science program in San Diego where he produced mainly welding figurative sculpture under the direction of Italo Scanga.

After his graduation he firstly moved to Beijing in 1987 before he enrolled at the Chinese university of Guangzhou. Krause stated “in all my art history classes, I had never read about a Western sculptor who had moved to China and let that culture influence his or her work. I wanted to be the first sculptor to do it.” At GAFA, Daniel studied under Liang Ming Cheng and Pan He, that were two of China's prominent contemporary sculptors of the 1980s. While studying in China Krause changed his primary material to bronze. He transitioned from an avant-garde art unit at UCSD, that mainly worked on Conceptual Environmental Art, leading edge Conceptual Happenings, and Contemporary Sculpture, to a Soviet Style Public Monumental Sculpture unit in China. Krause creates large contemporary monumental sculptures that are placed in public spaces. His sculptures usually depict human figures that vary in their abstractness. In 2011, the artist created two bronze sculptures for the two skyscrapers of the Excellence Century Center in Shenzhen, China.

"The Engineer" and "Welcome" human figures made out of geometrical forms and were placed in the lobby of the business buildings. The sculptures are each 5 meters high, 2.5 meters long and 1.5 meters wide. "The Engineer" depicts a civil engineer. He is a symbol of political and economic change in China in the 1980s and '90s - "an open society that was more economically capitalistic than the West," according to the artist. During this time, new cities and skyscrapers were being built all over China, clearly showing that the country was on the move. With "Welcome," Krause wanted to represent a new era of China on the world stage, as the figure welcomes China's new generation. It welcomes a new Chinese society in which people have enough money to buy cars and other status symbols. It also represents the welcome of Chinese people to the world, as they have more opportunities to travel.

Megan C. McShane, Professor of Modern Art at the Florida Gulf Coast University describes that Krause’s “figures exhibit the dynamism we can only associate with radical changes undergone by the Futurists in Italy in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Nearly all the Futurists came from the countryside, where the speed of life was dictated by the speed of a peasant’s horse-drawn cart. The new technologies of radio, automobile, electricity, and public transport galvanized the Futurist’s response in their calls for “Speed” and “Dynamism.” One hundred years later, in Daniel’s work, we have an echo of the response to that same Industrial and Technological Revolution happening in today’s China and the world we call Globalization.”

Krause worked for most of his career with the Zee Stone Gallery in Hong Kong. Before the gallery was closed the artist has been represented by the gallery from 1995 to 2017. From the 1990s to 2017 his sculptures have been presented in the Wilburs Gallery in Guangzhou, China. Presently Krause is represented by Western Galleries.

In 2018 Krause bought an art studio in Taos, New Mexico, one of America’s oldest art communities. He stated that “the combination of Spaniards, Indians, Europeans, and “other” Americans, plus the scenery, has turned Taos into a very special place.”

His artworks have been part of numerous solo and group exhibits around the world. His sculptures are part of the collections of the Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou, China; the University City Art Museum, Guangzhou, China; the Fort Harris Hotel, Clearwater, Florida, USA; the Excellence Century Center, Shen Zhen, China; the OTC Over Seas Chinese Developers, Shen Zhen, China; the Cyberport Development, Hong Kong; the De Shan Art Space, Mr. Kao Yun Qi, Beijing, China; the Mr. Wang’s Foundation art collection, Beijing, China; the Times Real Estate Development, Guangzhou, China; the Wharf Holding Company, Chengdu, China and the The Oriana Hotel, Orange, NSW, Australia.