Rio de Janeiro-based Catalan artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané creates atmospheric installations that draw from Catalan conceptual art and Brazilian art of the 1960s, and challenge Western modernist dualities.
Read MoreBorn in Barcelona, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané studied at the EINA University School of Design and Art, Barcelona, graduating in 1999. He went on to study at the Grisart International School of Photography, Barcelona, graduating in 2000. Adding to his artistic and conceptual lexicon, Steegmann Mangrané moved to Rio de Janeiro in 2004. The artist reflects the particular influence of Latin American Constructivists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.
Steegmann Mangrané's oeuvre is extensive and diverse, incorporating mediums such as sculpture, film, sound, virtual reality, two-dimensional hologram, and installation. He experiments with fabricated situations in which the traditionally oppositional dualities of Western modernist thought—such as between concrete and abstract, reality and perception, object and subject, natural and artificial—are collapsed.
Dissolving the boundaries between nature and artifice has been of particular concern to Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's artwork. Ecology has been a major theme, driven, in part, by the ideas of Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. Several of the artist's works consequentially organically intertwine natural forms with abstract inorganic geometries.
Daniel Steegman Mangrané's Phasmides (2012) video work featured stick insects in a complex set of geometric shapes; the stick insects became object-like while the geometric shapes took on a living presence. His more recent Phantom (2014–2015) used virtual reality to immerse the viewer in a three-dimensional scan of the rapidly disappearing Brazilian Mata Atlántica rainforest.
More in line with Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's semiotic interest in signs and the blurred boundaries between tangible and intangible, hanging room partitions have been a key feature of several more recent exhibitions, such as ⧜ (2020)—shown at the Taipei Biennial 2020. The work possessed a transient essence that played off contradictions of fullness and void, continuity and interruption.
In Steegmann Mangrané's ⧜, brightly coloured curtains made of Kriska aluminium from the artist's home region of south Catalunya, divided the space into sections. Cut-out holes in the curtains, made with coloured frames, draw upon forms that are recognisable but resist any clear interpretation. As the viewer moves through either the curtains or holes the spaces dematerialise.
Sustaining a broad international audience, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané participates in numerous international biennials and art fairs, and his work features in gallery and institutional exhibitions around the world. Steegmann Mangrané's artworks can also be found in major public collections such as Tate, London; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Nouveau Musée National de Monaco; and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo.
Fog Dog, Esther Schipper, Berlin (2020); A Leaf-Shaped Animal Draws The Hand, Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan (2019); Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Nottingham Contemporary (2019); A Transparent Leaf Instead of the Mouth, Museu Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2017); Species of Spaces, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (2016); Daniel Steegmann Mangrané | Philippe van Snick, Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (2015); Apresentação, Centro Cultural São Paulo (2007).
Concrete Contemporary, Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2019); Mixed Realities, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2018); I Was Raised on the Internet, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2018); _Infinite Garden: From Giverny to Amazonia_¸ Centre Pompidou-Metz, France (2017); United States of Latin America, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (2015); Blind Field, Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, Michigan (2013).
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2020
