Collectable

This desire for fusion that is mimesis

Daniel Steegmann, the TRANSFORMATIVE nature

Executed in watercolour and pencil, the mural drawing Morphogenesis / Crypsis (2022) plays with the transformative tension between artificial and organic forms. While the lines compose a grid, the individual elements form the organic shape of forked twigs. This ambivalent appearance is created through associations of shapes and colours, depending on the viewer’s perspective. The disconnected margins of the drawing suggest that we are only facing a fragment and that the geometric pattern could continue. In the middle of the drawing are four actual twigs, visible and invisible at the same time, since the lines of the mural drawing emulate their shape, with the branches becoming integrated into the larger pattern, in a perfect symbiosis. The title alludes to Daniel Steegmann Mangrané’s fascination with the notion of mimesis as camouflage. Specifically, the notion of mimesis, not as a defence strategy for survival, but as the mythological desire to dissolve into the world. A concept theorised by the French sociologist and philosopher Roger Caillois in his landmark essay Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia (1935).

Works in the Collection

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[5944_012_pub / Imatge] A Dream Dreaming a Dream
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[5243_001_pub / Imatge] Sense títol
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artist

Born and educated in Barcelona, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané now lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He is part of the generation of artists that began their production at the beginning of this century. The artists’ varied techniques and media include film, sound, drawing, kaleidoscopic collages, photography, sculpture and gardens. Nature is a constant in his work, which explores the contamination and affinity of forms that exist between nature, art and architecture. Concerned with the global ecological crisis, he believes that any change in the natural environment also modifies our own nature. Both in his sculptures, which are extremely fragile and incorporate altered organic material, and in his filmic work, the artist experiments with the correspondences between organic and geometric forms, and with the complex network of dependencies between natural order and the order created by human beings.

Solo exhibitions include: Kunsthalle Münster (2020), Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2019), Institut d’art contemporain, Villeurbanne/Rhône-Alpes (2019), Nottingham Contemporary (2019), CCS Bard College, New York State (2018), Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona (2018), Fundaçaô Serralves, Porto (2017), Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín (2016) and Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro (2015). He has participated in biennials and triennials in Lyon, Berlin, New York, Paris, Porto Alegre and São Paulo, among others. His work is included in the collections of Tate Modern, London; Museu de Arte Moderna, Rio de Janeiro, Museu Serralves, Porto; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Castilla y León; Fundació “la Caixa” and MACBA, Barcelona.
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MACBA Thirty

We celebrate Year Thirty of an infinite MACBA that projects the future as a space for revision and possibility: of taking up what was left unfinished, updating what needs it and projecting anew everything that can still be transformed.

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