Sculptures of an Organic Artificiality

Atem, Lehm - the German words for “breath” and “clay”, a title inspired by a poem by Paul Celan - is the first monograph dedicated to Latvian artist Daiga Grantina. Grantina’s solo show at GAMeC in Bergamo represented a major evolution in her poetics, a decisive and coherent change of palette and pace compared to her amorphous in-situ installations that have characterized her work to date. A mural forms an open-ended structure with its potentially infinite combinations: It seems to breathe, constraining and distending the grounding of space.

The book’s structure mirrors this evolution, exploring a before, characterized by large-scale environmental installations in New York’s New Museum, the Biennale di Venezia and in Palais de Tokyo, Paris, to name a few, and an after, when the artist’s sculptural environments seem to shift their locus of perception.