Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle, born in Madrid, Spain, is an American conceptual artist whose practice encompasses photography, video, sculpture, and installation, often realized through socially engaged public projects. His work critically investigates the dialectical relationships between ideological constructs—such as modernism, modernity, and the technoscientific ambitions underlying utopian visions—and the social, geopolitical, and ecological phenomena that emerge as their consequences.

In his early projects, Manglano-Ovalle employed community-centered social engagement strategies to address issues related to migration, immigration, cultural identity, sociodemographic boundaries, and urban violence. These initiatives brought collective and local involvement to the fore as mechanisms for artistic and political expression.

Over time, his practice has evolved toward a more conceptual trajectory, engaging with complex discourses on culture, science and technology, and ecological systems. Through this expanded scope, Manglano-Ovalle has developed multidisciplinary works that foster critical dialogue across diverse realms of knowledge.

He has been the recipient of several prestigious fellowships, including those from the MacArthur Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts, recognizing both the intellectual rigor and socio-political relevance of his contributions to contemporary art.

Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle has produced several works that engage with the legacy of modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among which Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With is particularly notable. This piece is a half-scale architectural realization of Mies’s unrealized 1951 project, which had previously existed only in the form of drawings. Manglano-Ovalle’s sustained inquiry into Mies stems from a broader critical engagement with the ideologies of modernism and modernity. His work interrogates the modernist pursuit of novelty, innovation, and utopian ideals, revealing their inherent tensions and their collision with the dystopian dimensions of contemporary socio-political realities.

In Gravity Is a Force to be Reckoned With, Manglano-Ovalle brings into material existence an architectural vision that epitomizes Mies’s emphasis on the principle of "Less is More"—a radical reduction of form to its essential elements. The structure, composed almost entirely of glass with an austere steel frame, is visually striking yet functionally uninhabitable. The transparency of the glass walls collapses the boundary between interior and exterior, inviting the surrounding environment into the architectural space. Yet, paradoxically, this openness also evokes the sterile enclosure of a laboratory or a containment chamber—spaces associated more with surveillance and control than with elegance or livability.

Within this tension-filled space, Manglano-Ovalle introduces objects and scenarios that articulate a latent resistance to authority and a critique of suppressed freedoms. These elements complicate the formal purity of the structure, embedding within it a subtle but powerful commentary on the disjunction between ideological aesthetics and lived experience. The work ultimately poses a series of questions to the viewer—about modernity’s promises and failures, and about the fragile balance between power, transparency, and human agency.