Tales From the Garden
Baró Galeria
Mamali Shafahi & Domenico Gutknecht
March - May 2026
Perhaps the garden was, in its origin, the smallest piece of the world: a constructed space of domesticated nature arranged for aesthetic contemplation. Historically, the garden has functioned as a way of ordering the living, folding its growth into a human logic. Yet gardens also gave rise to labyrinths and hidden corners, where secret conversations took place—conversations capable of threatening entire empires. To this panoptic mode of contemplation there followed an unplanned use of space: the garden as a site of the unforeseen, and as a place of mystery.
It is within this shift that Mamali Shafahi and Domenico Gutknecht situate Tales from the Garden, their first exhibition at Baró Mallorca. In their work, the garden is no longer domesticated nature, but an overflowing space where fable and the unknown emerge. Continuing the duo’s ongoing cycle, Eternal Rest, this project reflects on the garden as a symbolic space inhabited by hybrid figures that exist between memory and imagination. Working across painting and sculpture, the artists construct an environment in which individual works appear as fragments of a larger landscape.
The works in the exhibition are articulated through an intense chromatic range that moves between deep greens, burgundy reds and electrified blues. Carefully composed, they bring together a profusion of creatures and natural elements that invite a slow gaze. Each organic form seems implicated in another, and each detail opens onto a possible drift.
In her book Historia natural (Natural History), María Negroni traces different ways of approaching the world through historical figures who observe, record and, at the same time, fabulate nature. This gesture resonates in the practice of Shafahi and Gutknecht, where what is observed never fully separates from what is imagined. To look, in this context, is to sustain a form of attention that embraces ambiguity and the instability of the visible.
In works with narrative titles such as Echo, Passage or Witness, the vegetal, the animal and the human appear intertwined in a constant state of transformation: bodies becoming landscape, creatures oscillating between the recognizable and the strange. Scenes seem to emerge from a non-linear memory, closer to myth than to history. The artists draw on references ranging from Persian paradise gardens and miniature painting to medieval European folklore, fairy tales and religious iconography. These tensions also extend to their own trajectories, forming a duo shaped between artistic training and self-taught practice.
Tales from the Garden unfolds as a space in which hierarchies are suspended, and where the human no longer occupies the center but becomes part of a broader, unstable and at times unsettling ecosystem.