Daniëlle van Ark (1974) graduated in 2005 at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in The Hague. Since 2004 she has lived and worked partially in New York, where she assists Dana Lixenberg and receives commissions from various clients, and partially in Amsterdam. Van Ark has exhibited at Riviera Gallery, Brooklyn, the Public Library, The Hague (2003) and was nominated for the Steenbergen Stipendium 2005. In 2006 her series ‘For Art’s Sake’ was on show in 3h in Foam.

‘Mounted Life’
The ‘Mounted Life’ series by Danielle van Ark shows portraits of animals in depots of Natural History Museums from all over the world. Animals are mounted in such a way that it feels and looks almost natural and alive. Their posture, their behaviour and relation to their surroundings all seem real and frozen in time only by the switching on of the lights in the normally dark and forgotten depot. When the photograph is taken and the lights are switched off again, it seems as if the animals will come back to live in their newly man-created habitats.

A selection of ten works from the ‘Mounted Life’ series is for sale in Foam editions.