Atem, Lehm

the German words for breath and clay, a title inspired by a poem by Paul Celanis the first monograph dedicated to Latvian artist Daiga Grantina.

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