Galeria Fortes Vilaça is pleased to announce an exhibition by Leda Catunda. This time, the artist presents three new large-scale artworks, specially created for our gallery’s exhibition room, as a great installation.
These artworks are strictly related to representation of nature. In Paisagem com Onça [‘Landscape with Jaguar’], Catunda presents a landscape composed of hundreds of pieces of printed fabric with images of plants, flowers, skies, and jaguars. In Duas Árvores [‘Two Trees’], as the title indicates, two trees made of fabric entwine with four small blue plastic lakes placed on the ground. In Rio Comprido [‘Long River’], the artist has built a great plastic and canvas structure completely painted in blue. The artwork has several scissures that expose the wall to which it is attached, and forms a large river that flows to the ground and runs two meters into the room.
In all these pieces, the artist combines different colors and types of material, mixing diverse languages such as sculpture, installation, collage, and painting. In addition, Catunda makes use of patterns already existent in different fabrics, which confer a pop nature on her work.
Overlaid, cut, and printed, the fabrics used by the artist become complex and large works of art. The human scale impact of these pieces and their voluminous and inflated characteristics suggest a new way of seeing Catunda’s work. Duas Árvores and Rio Comprido, which occupy parts of the floor, provide visitors with the possibility of establishing physical contact with the artist’s work, as they can walk around the pieces.
These three artworks are the most recent development of Leda Catunda’s research on what she calls ‘poetics of softness’, in which she explores the properties of the materials used in her ‘soft paintings’. The artist’s trajectory may be observed at her current exhibition at the Estação Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, a great retrospective which brings works developed from 1983 to 2008. This is the most complete exhibition ever held of Catunda’s work. It comprises approximately 70 artworks amongst paintings, watercolors, and collages, and can be visited up to October 11.
