Leda Catunda’s investigations combine pictorial and sculptural possibilities in the reprocessing of textile materials, mass-produced garments, imagistic citations and painterly effects. Catunda tackles the incessant flow of visual and informational stimuli in the contemporary landscape with hyperbolic, saturated compositions where incongruent pictures, colors and textures find common ground. Developed over a decades-long career, the artist’s mutant iconography is both seductive and overwhelming: stuffed shapes beckon toward the sense of touch, while the desire to apprehend a work’s total form leads us to contemplate it from afar. At the undecidable frontier between painting and object, Catunda’s pieces unbalance pretensions of taste and the autonomy of artistic disciplines, jamming art-historical quotations alongside logos and readymade graphics. Printed images are sourced from family photos or from the debris of the cultural industry in an associative system anchored to social and personal memory.
Among the artist’s recent solo exhibitions are I like to like what others are liking, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (2025); Paisagem Selvagem, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024); Leda Catunda: EUFORIA, ICA Milano, Milan, Italy (2023); Judy Chicago & Leda Catunda, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Leda Catunda & Alejandra Seeber, MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2021); Projeto Parede | Paisagem moderna, MAM – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2019) and I Love You Baby, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil (2016). She has also participated in the group shows Gilberto Chateaubriand: uma coleção sensorial, MAM Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2025); Rituales del Cotidiano, Collegium, Arévalo, Spain (2024); Fullgás – Artes visuais e anos 1980 no Brasil, CCBB – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024); El Dorado, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Americas Society, New York, USA (2023) and Utopias e Distopias, MAM-BA – Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil (2022).
The artist has works included in important public collections, such as MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; MOCA – Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, USA; Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; Fundación ARCO, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA; MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Blanton Museum of Art – The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA; MAC-USP – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil and MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil.
