Yves Dana was born the 25th of June 1959, in Alexandria. In 1961, the Dana family leaves Egypt and settles in Switzerland. With a degree in Sociology from the University of Lausanne in 1978 and a diploma from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Geneva in 1981, Yves Dana makes his debut by teaching mathematics.
Since 1984, he has devoted himself solely to sculpture. He is the father of three children. Various works on iron, stone and bronze, as well as paintings mark the milestones of his creation, and outline different orientations in his research.
His work is very soon acknowledged by the Alice Pauli Gallery which as of 1984 holds several exhibitions and makes Yves Dana's work known both in Switzerland and overseas.
The Krugier & Ditesheim gallery in Geneva and New York continues to build on this momentum and contributes to establishing his reputation. The monumental sculptures, displayed in numerous locations, demonstrate the sculptor's superior understanding of space.
In 1996, a six-month journey to Egypt, Yves Dana's native country, marks a return to simple and hieratic forms: this is the beginning of the "Steles" series. A couple of years later, Yves Dana produces his first creations out of stone. Various individual and collective exhibitions follow, notably at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao.
Offered by various gallery owners, the artist also participates in major international fairs such as ART Basel, ART Miami, FIAC Paris, Arco Madrid and KIAF Seoul. In the course of his 35-year career, he has held some one hundred collective exhibitions and more than 40 individual exhibitions, often supplemented by publications. His catalogue features more than 600 sculptures.
Yves Dana's work is now regularly exhibited not only in Spain but also in France, Italy, Belgium, England, Singapore, Japan and the United States.
Various monographies have been published to this date, with the collaboration of renowned writers such as Bertil Galland (1988), Jacques Chessex (1996), Bernard Noël (2000), Charles Juliet (2008), Tahar ben Jelloun (2015) book and catalogue raisonné in two volumes.
Laureate of the Grand Prix de la Fondation Vaudoise pour la Création, for the entirety of his work (2015).
... Yves Dana's artworks are a plastic meditation on time, but are not slaves of their time, of their era. On the contrary, his sculptures are very exotic, inscribed in the long-term history of the great mythologies, in the luminous serenity of dreams, in the memory of the species that each one of us carries buried deep within ourselves. His pieces appear as if they have sprung from a desolate archaeology, as if they were found there in the bed of a river or the heart of a volcano. Yet they are an exaltation of life in its energies, its impulses, its affects.