Daiga Grantina employs silicon, textile and plastics to create amorphous installations that appear to be organic sculptures. But in a world where we are surrounded by surrogates and synthetic materials, and familiar textures are not what they appear to be, it is becoming increasingly difficult to trust our senses. By challenging our perception of the boundary between the true nature of a material and the materials of nature, the Latvian artist questions the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial.
Atem, Lehm - the German words for Breath and Clay, a title that has been inspired by a poem of Paul Celan - is the first monograph dedicated to Daiga Grantina. Bringing together significant works by intertwined motives that run throughout her oeuvre, it also touches upon
an evolution in her poetics, presented in her latest exhibition at GAMeC in Bergamo, where she introduced a potentially infinite structure of modular squares filled with feathers or painted wood mounted on the walls.