Daniel Popper

Daniel Popper is a South African sculptor from Cape Town who makes enormous figurative sculptures, often several stories tall, that people can walk into or through. His trademark is a human body that splits, peels or opens like a door, revealing plants or empty space inside. Three of his works are in our catalogue: Modem Swamp, Chasm and Thrive.

Background

Popper began as a stage and production designer for music festivals, building sets and environments for large crowds at night. That background explains a lot about his sculpture: the scale, the emphasis on entrances and pathways, the way works are designed to be lit, projected on and photographed. Over the 2010s his festival pieces became landmarks at events such as Boom in Portugal, Rainbow Serpent in Australia, AfrikaBurn in South Africa and Electric Forest and EDC in the United States. He has also made a memorial sculpture for the Nelson Mandela School of Science and Technology in the Eastern Cape.

His first major exhibition in the United States, Human+Nature, opened at the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago in May 2021: five site-specific sculptures between 15 and 26 feet tall, set among the trees. It proved so popular that its run was extended until early 2023.

Materials and making

Popper's large works are typically built from glass-fiber reinforced concrete over steel frames, sometimes with wood and fiberglass. Sections are cast in molds, transported, and assembled on site. The surfaces are sculpted to look like weathered stone, cracked clay or bark, which makes the figures read as ancient things that have been uncovered rather than newly made. Many festival pieces are designed for projection mapping, so their color and texture change after dark.

Key works in the catalogue

Modem Swamp (2019). Made for the Modem Festival in Croatia, this eight-meter figure rises from rocks and lifts its face away like a mask. Where the head should be, ferns grow inside a hollow shell. The gesture is part horror film, part revelation: the face is a covering, and the real self is green and alive.

Chasm. Created as an entrance for the Nomad's Land area of EDC Las Vegas, Chasm stands just over 24 feet tall. A woman's head and chest are split vertically and pulled apart, the two halves held together by metal rods, and an archway is carved through her chest for festival-goers to walk through. Popper took the title from the geological term for a deep fissure in rock. The piece was conceived around 2019–20, and sources disagree on its exact debut year, but it was still standing for EDC in 2022.

Thrive (2020). Popper's permanent installation at the Society Las Olas residential tower in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, stands 27 feet high and weighs about 14 tons. A colossal woman, her skin cracked like dry stone, grips the edges of her own chest and pulls it open. Inside is a tunnel lined with living ferns and greenery that visitors can walk through. Look at her hands: the fingers are carved bending inward, as if she is straining against the weight of what she reveals. The parts were cast separately and assembled on site in November 2020.

Themes

Popper describes his figures as guardians or deities, and much of his work is about the relationship between people and nature. Opening the body to show plants inside turns a human form into a habitat, an idea that runs back through art history to the Green Man of medieval churches and to Ovid's stories of people changed into trees, as in Bernini's Apollo and Daphne. The cracks and fractures in his surfaces suggest both age and vulnerability: the figures look monumental and broken at once.

The scale also changes how people behave around them. A sculpture you walk through is closer to architecture than to an object on a plinth, and his festival works are designed to gather crowds, act as meeting points and frame photographs. That social function has made his work some of the most widely shared public art of recent years.

Comparisons

Popper belongs to a generation of artists making large-scale, highly photogenic figurative works for public spaces, alongside sculptors such as Jason deCaires Taylor, whose underwater figures are colonized by marine life, and Lorenzo Quinn, whose giant hands rise from Venice's canals and other sites. Compare also the eroded, crystal-filled forms of Daniel Arsham.

Where to see his work

Thrive is permanently installed at Society Las Olas in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and Popper's Lumen (2024) frames an entrance to the Society Wynwood building in Miami. Festival pieces such as Chasm and Modem Swamp are temporary or seasonal, so check the festivals and the artist's own channels for current locations.