Daiga Grantina has created a vast sculpture from a range of materials with varying qualities: hard and soft, transparent and opaque. Blended together in a strange and colourful landscape, each one of these materials has a role of its own in this organism that is playful, furious, confused, and a little ‘toll’ (the German term meaning ‘mad’ or ‘astounding’ which lends Grantina’s work its title).
The different elements of this assemblage-sculpture, exhibited in an unfinished and imperfect state, come to life thanks to beams of light that unite the various materials and, in turn, delimit further spaces. The uncontrolled atmosphere takes on a material form through the foam that expands into space, echoing the power of childhood flights of fancy in which tables and whatever materials are to hand suddenly become the stuff of improvised and potentially habitable refuges.
Daiga Grantina (b. 1985 in Riga, lives and works in Paris) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at HFBK in Hamburg. She has been invited by Vincent Honoré to participate in the forthcoming edition of the BALTIC Triennial in 2018, and her work will also feature this year in the exhibition Crash Test curated by Nicolas Bourriaud at La Panacée in Montpellier. Alongside her project at Palais de Tokyo, her work features in a joint exhibition with Athena Vida at Galerie Joseph Tang in Paris from February to March 2018.
Daiga Grantina’s work has been the subject of several monographic exhibitions, most recently at Kunstverein Hamburg (Germany, 2017), at Kunsthaus Bregenz (Austria, 2016) and at kim? Contemporary Art Center in Riga (Lithuania, 2016). Her work has also featured at the Vienna Biennial (Austria, 2017), at the Museum of Modern Art of Belgrade (Serbia, 2017, curated by Julie Boukobza and Simon Castets), at the Kunsthalle Mainz (Germany, 2017) and at Bergen Kunsthall (Norway, 2016).
Text and images via: ArtViewer | Exhibition view of Daiga Grantina, “Toll”, Palais de Tokyo (16.02 – 09.09.2018). Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris. Photo: André Morin
Palais de Tokyo
13 Avenue du Président Wilson, 75116 Paris, France
Until May 13, 2018
JUNE JOON JAXX 