Danielle Creme
Switzerland
Danielle Creme is a contemporary portrait and figurative artist who works mainly with oils on canvas. Having grown up in Israel and the UK, she now lives and works in the Canton of Zurich. She is known for her emotionally charged figurative paintings and explores themes of migration, identity, motherhood and belonging through a unique style of abstracted realism, blending precise portraiture with expressive abstraction. The central theme of her work is the concept of 'home', a question that runs through her paintings: What is home? Is it a place, a memory, a body, or something we carry within us?
The Migration Series (2024–2025) explores the emotional and psychological aspects of migration, including the experience of leaving and the ongoing sense of being in-between. The series explores the impact of change and flux on individuals, families and communities. A recurring motif in these works is the checkered blanket that the artist inherited from her late mother. This symbolises continuity and home across borders and generations. Figures fade in and out of abstraction, caught between bold fields of colour representing the past and the future. This personal heirloom has accompanied her across countries and now represents memory, resilience, and the persistence of belonging.
The paintings explore two interconnected themes: migration and motherhood. These are profoundly transformative experiences, stretching identity between light and shadow, belonging and loss. Works such as Adama Adam Dam (2024), Eve (2025) and Motherhood (2024) connect the personal to the political, transforming grief, maternal love and memory into broader reflections on the concept of home. Adama Adam Dam anchors the exhibition as a meditation on rupture, grief and the impossibility of returning home. Drawing inspiration from Creme's childhood on a kibbutz, the painting depicts a curled figure on a floor adorned with hand-painted tiles, each one bearing fragments of memory: fig trees, bomb shelters, bread slicers, and water towers. These ordinary motifs are transformed into symbols of loss and permanence, turning the intimate into the universal.
In Eve and Motherhood, Creme considers maternal love to be another form of home. The mother becomes both a sanctuary and a sacrifice; her body becomes both a home and a battleground. Alongside Adama Adam Dam, these works provide a multifaceted exploration of how memory and lived experience influence identity and a sense of belonging.
« I am drawn to the struggles of the human condition and the search for identity and community...
Lately I have been most preoccupied with the exploration of home in relation to identity —
what or where is home within the context of land, culture, memory, and self. »
- Danielle Creme
Through these paintings, Creme invites viewers to engage in an intimate dialogue that acknowledges contradiction — the beauty and grief of migration, the radiance and exhaustion of motherhood, and the duality of memory, which can be both burdensome and comforting.
Migration I
Danielle Creme: Migration I / 100 x 135 x 4 cm, Oil on Linen, 2024
Artist Statement:
'Migration I' is the first in a series exploring the complex and deeply personal question: What is home? This painting reflects on the impact of migration on the individual - capturing the tension between memory and adaptation, between holding on and letting go. The two contrasting background colours represent the past and the present (or perhaps the uncertain future), with the figure suspended between them, visually and emotionally. Painted in a style of abstracted realism, the work blends precise portraiture with expressive abstraction. The background fades in and out, mirroring the fragmentation of memory and identity, while thick, drippy markings run through the canvas - echoing the bleeding hearts and fluid passage of time that migration so often entails.
At the heart of the work is a checkered blanket, a recurring motif throughout the series. It once belonged to my mother and has accompanied me through every place I've lived - a constant amid change. Since her passing, it has come to symbolise comfort, memory, and the idea of home itself. The painting speaks to the feelings of displacement, loneliness, and struggle that often come with migration, but also the resilience, new opportunities, and quiet strength found in preserving one's identity and traditions within unfamiliar landscapes.
- Danielle Creme
Migration II
Danielle Creme: Migration II / 125 x 170 x 4 cm, Oil on Linen, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Migration II' delves into the impact of migration on the family unit, where each figure holds a different emotional weight. At the centre is the child, swathed in the same checkered blanket that threads through the series - a symbol of home, continuity, and inherited memory. The child's direct gaze, calm and assured, contrasts with the more fragmented presence of the parents. Children often adapt swiftly to new environments, but this resilience can come with an unspoken burden: the quiet responsibility of carrying forward cultural identity. The mother is rendered as a soft, fading outline, symbolising how the act of nurturing can blur personal identity, especially under the strain of transition.
Her bowed posture suggests both care and exhaustion. The father stands in the background, his form solid yet weighed down, the dark horizontal line across his shoulders evoking a crucifixion - an image of sacrifice and silent endurance. The painting, like the first in the series, is composed in a style of abstracted realism. Fading forms, drips of paint, and the raw blending of colour suggest emotional seepage, the merging of timelines, and the struggle to hold a family together while straddling two worlds - past and present, origin and destination.
- Danielle Creme
Migration III
Danielle Creme: Migration III / 200 x 100 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Migration III' continues the exploration of home through the lens of bureaucracy and belonging. Here, the focus shifts to the often invisible yet deeply felt limbo of waiting - the endless lines for food, documentation, and recognition that accompany migration. A procession of adults, faceless and fragmented, moves across the canvas in a blur of green tones, echoing both institutional sterility and emotional disconnection. Their presence is muted, obscured by abstraction and drips of paint, symbolising depersonalisation and the erosion of identity in the face of red tape.
At the heart of the work is a young child, rendered with striking clarity. Clutching a parent's hand and trailing the familiar checkered blanket - an emblem of continuity across the series - she gazes outward with quiet resilience. The vibrant red space she stands in suggests both danger and transformation, a vast emotional landscape she inhabits unknowingly. Within the folds of the blanket rests a small toy monkey, seemingly cradled in the fabric and watched over by the child, creating a tender loop of care and connection - an "infinity mirror" of protection amidst chaos. The stylistic language of abstracted realism persists, with figures fading in and out of focus, merging into painterly fields of colour. The drips and smudges suggest the erosion of certainty and the blur of time, while the sharp rendering of the child anchors the viewer in the emotional truth of the scene. This piece speaks to the adaptability of children, their ability to play and feel safe despite uncertainty, so long as a hand is held and a loved one is near.
- Danielle Creme
Migration IV
Danielle Creme: Migration IV / 100 x 120 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Migration IV' explores the emotional weight carried by young families starting over in a new land. The father is shown bearing both his partner and their child, his face marked by effort and fierce resolve. There's a tenderness in the way he holds them, but the strain in his hands and posture makes visible the physical and psychological burden of protecting one's family while navigating the unknown. The mother, wrapped in the familiar checkered blanket that runs throughout the series, turns inward - her gaze fixed solely on the child in her arms. She is fully present yet partially abstracted, her outline fading into the deep blue of the background. This soft dissolution hints at how nurturing can eclipse the self, especially under the pressures of migration. Her attention is entirely on the baby, whose presence symbolises both vulnerability and hope - a new beginning, rooted in love but shadowed by displacement.
The composition is split once more between two bold colour fields: deep blue and golden yellow. The figures stretch across both, visually suspended between memory and future, heritage and adaptation. Painted in a language of abstracted realism, the scene slips in and out of clarity. Drips and exposed underdrawings bleed through the figures and background, echoing the ongoing passage of time and the fragility of identity in flux. This work, like the rest of the series, is anchored by personal symbols. The checkered blanket - once belonging to the artist's mother - offers a constant thread of continuity across borders and generations. Here, it serves as both shield and shroud, wrapping the family in a legacy of comfort and memory, even as they step into unfamiliar terrain.
- Danielle Creme
Migration V
Danielle Creme: Migration V / 50 x 60 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Migration V' returns the focus to the individual, offering a quieter, contemplative moment within the broader narrative of movement and belonging. Here, the familiar checkered blanket - already established throughout the series as a deeply personal emblem of home - is reimagined as a traditional headwrap. In this form, it becomes a crown of culture and identity, worn with quiet pride. The subject gazes off - frame, her expression composed yet alert, as if absorbing the new while holding fast to the old. The use of colour is deliberate: her face rendered in warm, saturated tones against a background of split hues - deep burgundy and soft yellow - signifying once again the tension between origin and destination, between what is carried and what is encountered.
The composition rests in stillness, but the material atop her head moves with energy. Thick brushstrokes and vibrant colour passages animate the cloth, while drips of paint cascade down like threads unravelling or memories seeping through. The contrast between the tightly observed portrait and the expressive abstraction of the blanket reinforces the duality of migration: the internal clarity of identity versus the external turbulence of change. This piece honours cultural continuity - not as nostalgia, but as living, wearable memory. The headdress becomes both shelter and statement. Worn with dignity, it declares that home is not only a place we leave or seek, but something we carry within us - stitched into ritual, rhythm, and the fabric of our traditions.
- Danielle Creme
Migration VI
Danielle Creme: Migration VI / 70 x 80 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Migration VI' turns its gaze toward the shared burden between couples - those who make the difficult choice to leave behind what is known, often for safety, love, or the hope of a better future. The painting captures a moment of pause and resilience, as two figures crouch together beneath the familiar checkered blanket. Their bodies lean in, anchored to one another in quiet solidarity. The couple is interracial, adding another dimension to the complexity of migration - where not only place but perception shifts. Their union, while rooted in love and strength, also bears the weight of navigating cultural differences and external scrutiny. In unfamiliar settings, their relationship can be both a source of power and a site of tension - an emblem of unity that sometimes draws attention, assumptions, or misunderstanding.
The man looks upward, beyond the frame, his face set with determination. His hands, rendered with a skeletal quality, feel worn and ghostlike - echoing the phrase "working his fingers to the bone." They speak of sacrifice and exhaustion, the physical toll of starting over. His grip around the other's hand is both protective and fragile, suggesting tenderness even in hardship. Beside him, the woman sits curled into herself, her expression guarded but alert. She embodies the emotional weight of the journey - the fear, uncertainty, and strength required to move forward. Her arms are crossed tightly, almost as if bracing against the world. Yet the closeness of their bodies and the sheltering blanket above them offer a sense of unity and shared purpose.
The split background - burnt orange on one side, yellow on the other - continues the series' motif of duality, marking the emotional heat of departure and the stark light of arrival. As with the other works, abstracted realism allows the figures to drift in and out of clarity. Paint drips down like time, memory, or sweat - reminding us that migration is not a single event, but an ongoing process. Here, the checkered blanket is again more than fabric - it becomes a shield, a shared history, a home they carry with them. This painting is about love in motion, the unspoken strength of partnership, and the layered courage it takes to leave everything behind, face a world that may not fully understand you, and still hold onto each other.
- Danielle Creme
Adama Adam Dam
Danielle Creme: Adama Adam Dam / 180 x 120 x4 cm, Oil on Linen, 2024
Artist Statement:
'Adama Adam Dam' is a meditation on change, memory, and the impossibility of return. The central figure curls into herself in a foetal position, surrounded by the tiled floor of a childhood once lived and now unreachable. Her body, tender and bruised, speaks of grief - an inward collapse in the face of loss, of innocence shattered. The patterned tiles beneath her were designed by the artist and hold fragments of her early life growing up on a kibbutz in Israel. Each one becomes a vessel for memory: a fig tree, a bomb shelter, a bread slicer, a water tower. These symbols, once mundane or magical through the eyes of a child, now carry the weight of permanence and absence. The painting becomes not only a lament for a place but for a version of self that can no longer return.
Scattered flower petals - gathered from plants native to the region - represent moments suspended in time. Smell, colour, sound. Fragments of joy, fragments of war. They fall across the surface like memories trying to settle. And yet, nothing feels still. At its heart, Adama is about rupture. The moment when the illusion of permanence breaks. It is about war not as spectacle, but as something that reaches into the most intimate corners of identity - turning the familiar into something foreign, and the past into something unreachable. A portrait of a body remembering what the mind cannot yet bear.
- Danielle Creme
Motherhood
Danielle Creme: Motherhood / 70 x 80 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2024
Artist Statement:
'Motherhood' is a modern echo of the timeless mother - and - child motif, this painting captures the primal, protective force of motherhood. The mother stares out, alert and unyielding, while the child sleeps against her shoulder - peaceful, unaware, held. She is tired, but her strength hums beneath the surface. Her body becomes a barrier, her eyes a warning. Rendered in a language of abstracted realism, the forms stretch and distort just enough to let the emotion break through. The brushwork is raw and intentional, exaggerating the physicality of care. Red seeps through the background like blood or heat - a womb - like field that holds them both in an aura of safety and strain.
Motherhood honours the labour of love, the quiet ferocity of care, and the dual nature of motherhood: soft and sharp, weary and unwavering. It is both personal and archetypal, rooted in the sacred but shaped by the real.
- Danielle Creme
Liberty or Surrender
Danielle Creme: Liberty or Surrender / 80 x 100 x 2 cm, Oil on Canvas, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Liberty or Surrender' is inspired in part by Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, this painting reimagines the battlefield not as a site of revolution, but as the quiet, charged space between two people. Here, liberty is not found through conquest, but through the emotional reckoning that comes with love, loss, and the shifting terms of connection. The man stands, arm raised - not with a weapon but holding a patterned cloth that billows and breaks across the canvas echoing the movements of a flag. It flutters in red and white like a banner of passion and fatigue, love and surrender. His stance is not heroic in the traditional sense, but intimate - an attempt to shield, to hold on, or to mark an ending with dignity. His gesture is both protective and imploring, echoing the archetype of the standard - bearer, yet turned inward. Beneath him, the woman bends into her own space, her posture soft with resignation or reflection. She is not led, nor defeated - but caught in the complicated terrain of intimacy and departure.
The dripping paint and diffused contours suggest dissolution, memory, and the inevitable unravelling that comes with truth. This is not a portrait of conflict, but of aftermath. Of the battlefield we create and inhabit with those we love. A meditation on how we wave our flags - not in conquest, but in vulnerability.
- Danielle Creme
Eve
Danielle Creme: Eve / 180 x 120 x 4 cm, Oil and charcoal on Linen, 2025
Artist Statement:
'Eve' explores the duality of being a mother - the constant juxtaposition. On one hand, the love, care, and fierce protection felt is overwhelming. This love carries such purity and intensity that it seems like a radiant light, shattering inner darkness. Yet equally overwhelming is the exhaustion, doubt, frustration, and loss. Motherhood brings a constant sensory overload, a draining of resources and energy with little chance to recharge - often unrecognised by others. Identity blurs as the body becomes surrendered to the needs of the child. The repetition of daily tasks - feeding, nappies, dummies - echoes in the patterned tiles, each motif a reminder of the cyclical routines of care.
Technically, the painting merges figurative realism with expressive distortion, amplifying both tenderness and chaos. The fleshy tones are layered with loose brushwork, leaving traces of vulnerability in their rawness. The overlapping limbs and tilted perspectives create a sense of entanglement, mirroring the physical and emotional intensity of motherhood. The ornamental tiles, rendered in a deliberately flat, patterned rhythm, contrast with the fluidity of the bodies, grounding the work in repetition while emphasizing confinement. This piece is not a singular statement but a coexistence of truths: love and loss, joy and fatigue, intimacy and overwhelm. The mother is present in both states simultaneously - an image of surrender and resilience, of light and shadow held together in one body.
- Danielle Creme
See more of this artist here: Presentation 2024
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