Daniel Canogar

Daniel Canogar was born in 1964 in Madrid, Spain. He holds a Masters’ degree in Photography from New York University’s International Center of Photography and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Communication from the Complutense University of Madrid. He lives and works between Madrid, Spain and Los Angeles, United States.

 

Canogar’s fascination with the technological history of optical devices inspired him to create his own projection devices. The resulting artworks are mobile-like hanging sculptures that project images onto the surrounding walls. Canogar’s interest in the possibilities of the projected image led him to create monumental public artworks across the globe, such as Amalgama El Prado (2019), a generative video-projection projected on the Prado Museum’s façade (Madrid, Spain), Storming Times Square (2014), screened on 47 of the LED billboards in Times Square (New York, USA) and the Asalto series, projected onto emblematic monuments in several cities.

 

Canogar developed a flexible LED tile that allows him to create screens with complex curving shapes. These works invite viewers to seek out multiple perspectives in discovering the artwork, incorporating their movements in and around the work. He has created permanent public art installations with LED screens, including Dynamo for the Spanish Pavilion at Expo Dubai 2020 (Dubai, UAE), Aqueous at The Sobrato Organization (Mountain View, USA), and Tendril for Tampa International Airport (Tampa, USA).

 

With the advent of digital technology, Canogar continued re-conceptualizing visual media as sculpture. By projecting video animations onto obsolete media, he attempts to reignite life back into them so as to reveal the shared memory they hold within. Memory and its loss are a central theme in his work. Unless we remember, we are condemned to an amnesiac present, textureless and flat, lacking the perspective of time.

 

To be a spectator all too often means to remain on the sidelines of what we are watching. Canogar wants his artwork to activate an engaged viewer, one that experiences seeing as grounded in a moving sentient body. With this full-bodied gaze, the artist believes we not only have a richer experience of our world but are also able to claim a place in it for ourselves.

 

Canogar’s work has exhibited at the Reina Sofia Contemporary Art Museum (Madrid, Spain), The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C., USA), Wilde (Geneva and Basel, Switzerland), Chronus Art Center (Shanghai, China), Haus der elektronischen Künste (HEK) (Basel, Switzerland), Palacio Velázquez (Madrid, Spain), Mimmo Scognamiglio Artecontemporanea (Milano, Italy), Wexner Center for the Arts (Ohio, USA), Offenes Kulturhaus Center for Contemporary Art (Linz, Germany), Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfallen (Dusseldorf, Germany), Hamburger Banhof Museum, (Berlin, Germany), Borusan Contemporary Museum (Istanbul, Turkey) and the American Museum of Natural History (New York, USA).


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Selected Works

Exhibitions