The artist’s book A Leaf Shapes the Eye looks back at twenty-five years of work by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, from his earliest sculptures in 1997 to his installations of 2022.
Illustrated by hundreds of images, the book chronologically charts the development of Steegmann’s oeuvre from his first steps as an artist to the present-day in the centre pages, at which point it immediately embarks on a return journey, presenting new details and points of view of the works before arriving back at his earliest pieces. In its structure, the book thus forms a closed cycle that can be started anew.
Page by page, the juxtaposition of works and details reveals themes that recur over the course of Steegmann’s career, as well as formal connections between disparate pieces. Loose within it, the book also contains a series of facsimiles of notes and sketches that offer a unique introduction to this artist’s universe.
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané was born in Barcelona in 1977 and has lived in Brazil since 2004. In his research, he focuses in particular on biological processes and anthropological discourses that he uses as inspiration for creating immersive works that blur the traditional divides between nature and culture, subjects and objects, reality and dreams, dissolving these seeming opposites in mutually transformative relationships. As the title of the book indicates, it is not just that the gaze alters the leaf, but that the leaf also shapes the eye.
