Painting (Painting)

His Deck Painting I recalls the simplistic stripes of conceptual artist Daniel Buren, or the minimal lines of twentieth century abstract painting, but is in reality a readymade, fashioned from repurposed fabric of deck chairs. Alexandre da Cunha reinvents found objects in surprising ways that combine the material characteristics of Arte Povera with the concerns and techniques of painting. Da Cunha’s work often features flags—either as a found material per se or as a constructed form—that reflect the artist’s interest in issues of nationality, governmental politics, allegiance, and culture.

Glaze (Savana) (2005) is an assemblage of found materials: a car wheel, a tire, and a wooden plinth of the type traditionally used to display sculpture. It directly engages with the readymade, a subject that Alexandre de Cunha takes up throughout his practice, often inflecting it with a tropical, and South American–inspired materiality and painterly style that could potentially come across as a stereotype. Here, da Cunha transforms the component parts into a composition that highlights often-overlooked materials of artistic production and cultural mass-production.

Painting (Painting)

In Laissez-Faire (Rainbow Flag) da Cunha has turned a beach towel into both a painting and a flag. Where the printed surface of the towel originally served to enliven this commodity, here the pattern—now stretched and re-presented—suddenly refers to abstract painting’s promises of transcendence. And its crisply painted shape pulls the printed colors into the rectangularity of the canvas and, as da Cunha notes, the graphic iconicity of flags.

Photography (Photography)

The series West (Flag 1), West (Flag 3), and West (Flag 6) continues da Cunha’s ongoing exploration of the form’s various vertical, horizontal, and diagonal stripes. Here, da Cunha overlays thick bars of color (blue, green, and red) on photographs of the ocean at sunset with surfers in floating on the horizon. The solid colors contrast with the fading colors reflected in the sunset, and the tilted orientation suggests a familiar California beach scene.

Performance (Performance)

Furthering Alexandra Pirici’s enquiry into the economy and circulation of artworks, Parthenon Marbles is an immaterial version of the sculptural ensemble embodied by five performers. This ongoing performative action presents and addresses the challenges in the financial and legal implications and value of the original sculptures as cultural capital. The original Parthenon Marbles are a collection of Classical Greek marble sculpture inscriptions and architectural pieces that were originally part of the temple of the Parthenon and other buildings in the Acropolis of Athens, Greece.

Sculpture (Sculpture)

Typical Weapons is a series of sculptural interventions where Alejandro Marre transforms traditional Guatemalan craft objects usually sold as souvenirs into weapons. Wooden flutes, hacky sacks, and musical instruments are woven with rope to appear as nunchucks, slingshots, and other forms of armament. Designed to be exhibited as objects from an archaeological museum, the previously innocuous representations of Guatemalan popular culture acquire darker meanings as they come to symbolize the brutality and extreme violence that now mark the country.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

White Corner (2006) is a video installation, projected on two protruding perpendicular walls. On one level the work constitutes a self-portrait of the artist, whose image is projected on both walls, separated by the corner. Yet while facing, they don’t quite confront each other.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

Slow Graffiti was produced for Da Corte’s exhibition at the Vienna Secession in 2017. The video is a shot-for-shot remake of the film “The Perfect Human” by Danish filmmaker Jørgen Leth (1967). The original is narrated in an anthropological manner, or as if listening to a guide at a zoo, but Da Corte’s version is stranger and more philosophical.

Film & Video (Film & Video)

This still life falls apart, or rather floats apart as the composition is proved unstable and constantly morphing. An impossible attempt at achieving a fixed state, some objects remain buoyant and some objects sink, constantly tilting the overall scale and arrangement. Properties of weight, mass and shape have their own will but a hand appears in the scene, pushing back on these mysterious forces.