Daiga Grantina at New Museum

Artist: Daiga Grantina

Exhibition title: What Eats Around Itself

Curated by: Helga Christoffersen

Venue: New Museum, New York, US

Date: January 21 – May 10, 2020

Photography: All images copyright and courtesy of the artist, New Museum, New York and their respective copyright owners

New York, NY…The New Museum is pleased to present “Daiga Grantina: What Eats Around Itself,” the first institutional solo exhibition in the US by Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia), on view in the Museum’s Lobby Gallery from January 21 to May 10, 2020. Grantina makes large-scale sculptural assemblages that emulate the natural world, often resembling terrariums, plants, and vegetation. Employing industrial and synthetic materials, her configurations incorporate conflicting physical qualities: soft and hard, transparent and opaque, mobile and static.

The exhibition’s title references the dynamic growth of lichen, a composite organism that results from the symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae. Grantina draws inspiration from lichen’s many adaptive qualities, like coexistence and self-replication, in developing her material processes. She also references the lyricism of poet Rainer Maria Rilke, particularly his abstract comparisons of rose petals to eyelids; Rilke imagines the opening of a rose as a swirl of self-generating eyes, one bringing the next to life.

For her New Museum presentation, Grantina will premiere a new, site-specific sculptural installation that interweaves cast silicone with paint and fabric. Suspended from industrial fixtures in the ceiling and clinging to the gallery walls and floor, this work mimics the growth of lichen, which typically develops into a crusty, leaflike, or branching formation on rocks, trees, and other surfaces. The work’s flexible, amorphous structures appear to be undergoing either construction or decomposition, much as lichen reproduces and consumes its own biological matter.

“Daiga Grantina: What Eats Around Itself” is curated by Helga Christoffersen, Executive Director, Art Hub Copenhagen, and former New Museum Associate Curator.

Daiga Grantina (b. 1985, Saldus, Latvia) lives and works in Paris. She studied at the University of Fine Arts Hamburg and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Grantina represented Latvia at the 2019 Venice Biennale with her solo presentation “Saules Suns.” She has had solo exhibitions at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018); Kunstverein Hamburg (2017); Kim? Contemporary Art Center, Riga (2016); and elsewhere. She has participated in the 13th Baltic Triennial in Vilnius (2018), the Vienna Biennial (2017), and Bergen Assembly (2016), as well as in group exhibitions at Musée d’Orsay, Paris (2018); Villa Vassilieff, Paris (2018); Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga (2018); La Panacée, Montpellier, France (2018); Platform-L, Seoul (2018); and Kunsthalle Mainz (2017).

The New Museum is the only museum in New York City exclusively devoted to contemporary art. Founded in 1977, the New Museum is a center for exhibitions, information, and documentation about living artists from around the world. From its beginnings as a one-room office on Hudson Street to the inauguration of its first freestanding building on the Bowery designed by SANAA in 2007, the New Museum continues to be a place of experimentation and a hub of new art and new ideas.

“Daiga Grantina: What Eats Around Itself,” 2020. Exhibition View: New Museum, New York. Photo: Toan Vu-Huu