Silver is a sculptor known for his exploration of the human head, and the cabinets here are filled with wonky, roughshod heads of plaster and clay, with eyes and noses in all the wrong places.
There, they created an inflatable raft of rubber raincoats held together with thread and contact cement, plywood paddles, plastic bags crudely turned into floating devices and dummy heads of plaster and toilet paper, made realistic with paint from prison art kits and hair clippings from the barbershop.
Making the mould involves covering your head in plaster of Paris and then letting that set and then making the mould of that plaster of Paris mould.
"We moulded the head of Jean Paul in plaster and we will have [film] projections right onto the face," explains Thierry-Maxime Loriot, the curator of the exhibition.
It is based on an open-work wooden armature to which a hand-modeled plaster head and a pair of plaster arms have been attached.
Daniel Silver sets his human and humanoid heads on biomorphic lumps of plaster, on wonky columns and fanciful plinths, which are often more interesting than the heads themselves.
"While he was talking, I saw on his desk a plaster head of a human being and he saw me looking at it and he said, 'Oh this plaster head, that's the head of a Jew, because we were taught how to recognise Jews by the structure of their head,'" says Knoller. "With that he got up from his desk, went behind me and he took my head between his two hands, tracing it.
And in the plaster "Head of a Woman" from 1932, the distended brow and rounded chin of Marie-Thèrèse Walter evoke the sensual asymmetry of "Le Rêve," painted the same year.
To understand a major reason why Nakian's art seems remote, a viewer has only to turn to the outsized plaster head of Marcel Duchamp that Nakian made in 1943.
We have here, for instance, a reduced-version bronze cast head by François Rude from a relief on the Arc de Triomphe, and a plaster head of the 19th-century French writer Balzac by Rodin for his Balzac monument.
In the bronze "Woman's Head (Fernande)" (1909), he tested out Cubism's shifting approaches to mass and form; the plaster "Head of a Woman" (1932) toyed with Surrealism (it was reproduced in the first issue of the influential avant-garde journal Minotaure).
