Introduction
“To meld the interior and exterior of an exhibition is one of the first duties of art: the museum space can no longer be a space for the accumulation of artefacts, insulated and protected from the outside world, but must become a place where our relationship to objects and reality is reconfigured.”
This is one of the challenges of the Spanish artist Daniel Steegman Mangrané. Inside a vast vivarium, he makes use of tropical growth and life forms in what is still a strictly modernist sculptural space. Inside that vivarium, chameleon-like stick insects quiz the notion of movement and our perception of it. Similarly, the arabesques inspired by the Savoy vase, designed in 1936 by Finnish designer Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino, also evoke a moving surface whose undulation is represented by a static industrial object. The transparency of the walls in A Transparent Leaf Instead Of The Mouth, like the camouflage of the stick insects among the plants, offers nothing for the viewer’s gaze to rest on. Instead, one’s gaze shifts from the living to the inert, and thus produces the movement it had been looking for.