In the pulsating underground culture of the late 1990s and early 2000s in Spain, where coexistence, culture, and community became a territory of sensory and ephemeral experimentation, David Magán (Madrid, 1979) began to develop a perspective that would, over time, define his entire artistic practice.
Trained at the well-known Palma School of Art in Madrid's Malasaña neighborhood, his work cannot be understood solely as sculpture; an understanding of his work reveals, behind the abstraction, a visual and bodily memory that, starting from experiments with glass, brings together the value of the body, light, music, and architectural space as influences that shape collective experience.
An abstract sculptor and installation artist, David Magán develops a dialogue through light, color, and the play of perceptions, generating a constant enigma about the possibilities of individual perception. Starting from manual and digital experiments, his work manages to fragment through movement. The result is a practice that operates on several levels simultaneously.
On one hand, it keeps the experiential dimension alive: the viewer does not observe the work from the outside but activates it with their presence and movement, altering reflections, discovering new chromatic combinations, and modifying their own perception of space. On the other hand, it introduces a reflection on how this experience is constructed, translating the ephemeral into the analytical realm.
In David's youth, marked by a music scene that valued community and sensory experience, light became living matter. It is in that imaginary and in small moments, when David interacted with light games, that the artist's sensibility can be understood, with a particular attraction to the intangibility of light, understanding it not from its functionality, but as an element that constructs space and experience.
David's work is not governed by a single format. Through photography, sculpture, installation, and digital printing, the artist explores how optical interferences emerge from color and geometry, generating visual architectures in tension and harmony, as precise in their execution as they are expansive in their possibilities.
Thus, David Magán's trajectory traces a path from immersion to construction, from collective experience to form, from intuition to precision. His work does not reproduce the aesthetic of an era, but rather translates its essence, transforming the memory of light—that which once inhabited the air of a dance floor—into a tangible, rigorous, and profoundly contemporary architecture.
Discover the full interview in the video.
Credits:
David Magán Studio
Interview: Romina Llaguno
Video and photography: Daniel Ortiz
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