Über uns

Artist Mariana Castillo Deball has delved deep into the Towner Collection to discover works that have rarely been displayed and will present these alongside familiar and much-loved depictions of the Sussex landscape. Amongst the considerable holdings of works on paper, Mariana was immediately drawn to Leslie Moffat Ward’s The Long Man of The Downs, 1943, a modest-sized print of the larger-than-life hill figure. This print is central to the exhibition and continues Mariana Castillo Deball’s fascination with geoglyphs, large drawings in the landscape that have informed her upcoming England’s Creative Coast Commission here in Eastbourne.

Mariana Castillo Deball takes a kaleidoscopic approach to her practice, mediating between science, archaeology, and the visual arts and exploring the way in which these disciplines describe the world. Her installations, performances, sculptures, and editorial projects arise from the recombination of different languages that seek to understand the role objects play in our identity and history. Her works result from a long research process, allowing her to study the different ways in which a historical object can be read as it presents a version of reality that informs and blends into a polyphonic panorama. Seeking to initiate a dialogue with institutions and museums beyond contemporary art, she collaborates with ethnographic collections, libraries, and historical archives. She often produces multiples —books or objects with different uses and formats— to explore how they might generate new territories. Weaving her way through the fields of anthropology, philosophy, and literature, Castillo Deball draws inspiration from a wide range of sources as she engages in the exchange of knowledge as a transforming process for everyone involved.

Mariana Castillo Deball earned a BFA from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in 1997. In 2003, she completed a postgraduate program at Jan van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands. Deball has been awarded with the Prix de Rome (2004), Zurich Art Prize (2012), a fellowship at the Henry Moore Institute (2012), and the Preis der Nationalgalerie für junge Kunst (2013). She was an artist in residency at the Berliner Künstlerprogramm in Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) in 2011.

Mariana Castillo Deball lives and works in Berlin.