Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel proudly announces Um Lugar para a Cabeça [A place for the head], Gokula Stoffel’s new solo exhibition in São Paulo. The exhibition, featuring works made over the last year, expands Stoffel’s investigations into pictorial matter and fragmentary approach to figuration.

In an exploratory, process-guided practice, the artist embraces accidents and chance results as co-creators of the paintings and sculptures presented in the show. Whether unraveling a patch of paint to depict an arm or turning a human figure into the image of a landscape, Stoffel is interested in the distortions and upheavals of form and scenery. The swirling, turbulent gestures that make up her shimmering surfaces lead to creatures emerging from a liquefied atmosphere, as in Salso Reino (2025) and Morcego (2025). A range of optical vibrations appear, as a result of the artist’s incorporation of metallic finishes and iridescent paint in her material repertoire, contributing to the scintillating light effects that appear across different media.

In works such as Espirro (2025) and the floor sculpture Umbigo-Espiral (2024), disparate elements are articulated through collagistic procedures. Although the former is abstract and the latter represents a deconstructed body, both are organized as spirals, a recurrent motif and spatial coordinate in the artist’s oeuvre. The transformations and constantly evolving character of natural environments are felt throughout Stoffel’s abstractions and imagery, with synaesthetic currents of feeling awakening according to color, texture or scale. Memória Olfativa (Olfactory memory) (2025), one of the largest paintings in the show, alludes to this crossing of sensory impressions, conjuring a sense of smell along with the concrete physicality that organizes the composition

Metamorphosis and altered perceptions create a terrain of shifting contours and blurred limits between human, animal and vegetable life that consistently evade identification and static positions.

The show features an essay by curator and researcher Ariana Nuala.