Daniel Steegmann. ‘A Leaf Shapes the Eye’

This is the first retrospective exhibition in Spain of the work of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, born in Barcelona in 1977 and resident in Rio de Janeiro for the last fifteen years. A place, according to the artist, where he can always be in direct contact with the world’s most pressing needs, whether ecological, political or social, all of them subjects reflected in his work.

Interested in exploring the complex interdependence of the organic world and human action, Steegmann focuses on the Amazonian Forest of Brazil, while also adopting the theoretical framework of the renowned anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who argues against the false dichotomy between humanity and the animal world by putting forward the notion that we are all part of a shared equilibrium and incorporating the paradigm of Amerindian perspectivism.

With a language close to Brazilian Neo-Concretism, Steegmann Mangrané explores the migration and affinities of forms between nature, art and architecture. Both in his fragile sculptures, made of intervened organic material, and in his creations of augmented reality, he experiments with the correspondences between organic and geometric forms and with the complex network of dependencies that exist in the biological order.

The exhibition includes drawings, paintings, photographs, sculptures, films and installations from the late 1990s to the present. It will be accompanied by an artist’s book, in which Steegmann Mangrané puts forward a circular visual cycle that begins with the artist’s early works and moves toward the present, only to return to the past, with collage interventions on these and other works. The publication has been co-produced with the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki, and the publisher of artists’ books BOM DIA BOA TARDE BOA NOITE from Berlin.