The MACBA presents the first retrospective dedicated to Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

With the title A leaf in the place of the eye, the exhibition, co-produced with the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki, brings together drawings, paintings, photographs, holograms, sculptures, films and installations made since the end of the nineties to the present day by the artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (Barcelona, 1977). The exhibition can be visited until May 20, 2024.

Steegmann Mangrané began his career by painting, but immediately felt the need to work on the relationship with space and the body that sculptures and installations allow. The tour brings together more than twenty works in various formats such as drawings, photographs, holograms, sculptures, films and installations, made from the late nineties to the present day, and has a work new production His artistic research is particularly interested in biological processes and new anthropological discourses, creating works that dissolve the apparent dualisms between nature and culture, subjects and objects, reality and dream, or visibility and invisibility.

Based on biology and the new anthropological discourses as conceptual frameworks, Steegmann Mangrané proposes a holistic worldview, in which there is no distinction between humans and their environment and where the relationships between all elements are in a constant flow His work questions colonial dualisms such as between culture and nature, subject and object, reality and dream, while incorporating the subjectivity and social agency of non-humans and inanimate elements.

For Steegmann Mangrané, who has lived in Rio de Janeiro for two decades, the rainforest is not just a place, but a living being that embodies the complexities of the contemporary world, whether environmental, political or social, and serves as a metaphor for the delicate balance and the interconnectedness of all things. Climate change reminds us that we are all part of the same organism, and that we are interwoven within a complex network of relationships of mutual transformation.

Steegmann Mangrané's work is also strongly influenced by Brazilian neoconcrete creators. Like them, the artist considers sensory involvement as a democratic and sociopolitical access to the work of art, which dissolves the borders that try to compartmentalize our experience of the world and transforms the exhibition of an inanimate object by to be seen in a constantly changing entity to be experienced with our body and with all the senses.

A leaf in the place of the eye brings together works made over the course of twenty-five years and builds a choreography between space, light, objects and people. Exploring the intricate connections between living matter and inert matter, the exhibition becomes a place that invites us to get involved physically, sensorially and intellectually, and to reconfigure our relationship with nature.