MAMALI SHAFAHI & DOMENICO GUTKNECHT

Tales from the Garden continues the duo’s ongoing Eternal Rest cycle, presenting the garden as a transitional space inhabited by hybrid figures, animals, and objects that exist between memory, transformation, and quiet notions of an afterlife. Rather than illustrating a linear narrative, the exhibition unfolds as a shared environment in which individual works appear as fragments of a larger imagined landscape, inviting viewers to move through a world shaped by suggestion and association.

Working across painting, sculpture, and immersive installation, Shafahi and Gutknecht construct fluid narrative worlds where the real and the fantastical remain deliberately porous. Their practice brings together distinct visual traditions, combining Persian paradise gardens, miniature painting, and symbolic animals with medieval European folklore, fairy tales, fables, and the iconography of altarpieces and reliquaries. These references intersect to form a hybrid visual language grounded in spiritual, historical, and personal memory.

Materiality and tactility play a central role in the duo’s process. Velvet like flocked surfaces introduce shifting depth and a theatrical quality, while hand built epoxy clay forms preserve gesture and intimacy. Recurring tonalities, including deep royal blue, establish a cohesive atmosphere across the exhibition, reinforcing the dialogue between painting and sculpture and contributing to the installation’s scenographic presence.

Based between Marseille and Paris, Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht have developed an internationally active collaborative practice that embraces ambiguity, metamorphosis, and collective myth making as core strategies. Tales from the Garden expands on earlier bodies of work, extending ideas first explored in the Rest in Peace series into a more immersive and interconnected environment, while maintaining a circular approach in which themes and forms continuously return and evolve.

The exhibition takes place at Baró Mallorca, located at Carrer de Can San 13, 07001 Palma de Mallorca, and is presented as part of Art Palma Brunch 2026, running from 11:00 am to 3:00 pm.