Daniela Soberman
Serbian-American
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Daniela Soberman is a first-generation Serbian American self-taught artist living and working in Los Angeles. Primarily known for her immersive architectural-scale sculptures, Soberman creates intimate works that redefine the balance between structure and unrestrained expression. 
 
Soberman’s art is greatly influenced by growing up in working class immigrant neighborhoods in Los Angeles coupled with her time spent in the former Yugoslavia as a child. The Eastern European city landscapes were experienced without restraint, shadowed by the brutalist buildings that accompanied her. The daughter of an inventor and an artist, Soberman says she tries to “tap into that same lack of fear and adventure when creating the work”. Fearlessness and rebellion rule. Soberman courageously simulates lost urban settings - angular and fluffy plastered jungles built on dreams and grit and disappearing poets. 
 
Soberman makes work that takes up space then throws it back at you. Her hand-sculpted creations seduce the viewer into realms of frenzied making, unmaking, and remaking. Towering interlocking forms, made of plaster and various other compulsive materials, are a silently approachable, yet looming vortex. They delight and depress and are reminiscent of “weathered stone, ruins, and glazed cookies bitten by gargantuan gods.” Soberman is a storyteller who wants us all to feel connected, unrestrained, and open to play. What this body of work evokes is part of a greater narrative - part of the impulsive integrity of those who welcome its invitation.

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Artist Statement
A friend suggested I write an artist’s statement to explain some of the ideas I’m exploring in the work. The truth is, I’m feeling many different things when I’m creating something. Here are some of the places where the ideas get generated from…

• Commonalities among humans
  • All humans build things. We all make similar marks. We are each connected on a fundamental level. 
  • Organic forms are created continuously in the natural world. Wind makes certain shapes, water makes others. Humans seem to make rectangles. I'm interested in the shapes humans make. 
  • That each one of us, at some point in our lives, have our worlds break apart, and then are tasked with re-configuring them, cobbling them back together using broken, discarded, and disparate pieces – into a new whole, a new constructed life of meaning.
• My own personal history 
  • Growing up as a poor “dark white,” working class child of immigrants in urban LA.
  • Being mute as a young child and finding ways to connect with others non-verbally.
  • ​Growing up and adventuring among dilapidating and oppressive Brutalist concrete buildings and housing projects that contain interior worlds that are vastly different than their exteriors.
  • My lineage from a people that are unruly and aggressive and channeling that angst into a socially acceptable form.  
  • Being a female from an expressive and historically brutal Eastern European culture and having that not fit into subdued American cultural norms -- and being othered for it.
• The questioning of social constructs
  • Meaningless and created by us to give our lives some sense of normalcy and structure, but which inadvertently separate us from each other. 
• Large, messy, bold expressive emotionality 
  • Because often women are expected to be delicate and I’ve never been. ​

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CV
b. Downey, CA [Los Angeles County]
​Lives and works in Los Angeles

Art Education
Self-taught


SOLO Exhibitions + Museum Commissions

2022/23   GALLERY SOLO. When We Grow Up, Gallery SADE,
​       Los Angeles, CA 
2022   MUSEUM SOLO. Points of Intersection, 
       Architectural-Scale Sculpture /                       Installation, Long Beach Museum
       of Art, Long Beach, CA 
2022   MUSEUM SOLO. Willmore, Resurrected, A         
       Architectural-Scale Sculpture / Installation,
       J. Paul Getty Museum and Long Beach Museum of
       Art, Long Beach, CA
2022   MUSEUM SOLO. Stage 3, Architectural-Scale
       Sculpture / Installation, Torrance Art Museum,
       Torrance, CA
2022   MUSEUM SOLO. Mutable Labyrinth, Architectural-
       Scale Sculpture / Installation, Torrance Art
       Museum, Torrance, CA
2022   MUSEUM COMMISSION. Memorial to the Future,
       Architectural-Scale Sculpture / Installation,
       Commissioned by the Torrance Art Museum for the
       LA Art Show,Los Angeles, CA

Selected Biennials

2022  Invited Finalist, Bucharest Biennale,
      Bucharest, Romania


Select Two-Person and Group Exhibitions
2023   No Plateaus. Duel Exhibition with Keywan
       Tafteh. Reisig and Taylor Contemporary. Los
       Angeles. [forthcoming]
2023   The Horror. Special gallery show to support the
       launch of literary art journal Spunk Art and
       Perspectives. At Seis Gallery, Los Angeles.
       [forthcoming] 
2023   Mercurachrome. Duel Exhibition with Nellie King
       Solomon. Changing Room, BERLIN Germany
       [forthcoming]
2023   Sabbath & Soberman Collab Sculpture as part
       of Zak Smith's Mid-Career Survey: An Unburnt
       Witch. Torrance Art Museum. 
2023   Fever Dream Dream Fever. Los Angeles Mission
       College. Curated by Curtis Stage and Adam F
       Scott. 
2023   Fashion District. Fosforita Madrid (SP) and
       Durden and Ray, Los Angeles 
2022   Beautiful, Not Pretty, (Inaugural Grand Opening
       Exhibition), Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2022   FUN GAL GRO UP SHO, introducing #nextwave 
       artists, Gallery SADE-LA, Los Angeles, CA
2022   Seismic State: California Ceramics.
       Juried and selected by Beth Ann Gerstein,
       Executive Director of AMOCA 
2021   Nomad, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA
2021   AAXIX, Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA
2021   National Open Show, Selected by Peter Frank,           Gallery 825, Los Angeles, CA
2021   Off-Center: International Ceramics Competition,
       Selected, Roseville, CA