Alexandre da Cunha’s new work combines utilitarian objects and traditional sculptural methods of carving and moulding to create ambitious new structures.  However, da Cunha’s use of these materials is loaded with their reference to high-modernist art through structure, pattern and motif. Brancusi columns made of gardenware, busts constructed from mop heads and stretched preprinted textiles emblazoned with music icons nod to the history and techniques of high art with an air of dollar store aesthetic. Aesthetically, da Cunha’s work nods toward Arte Povera and Fluxus, but from a background where reuse is part of everyday life. Da Cunha’s ambition with these new works is to establish structures that resonate within a more classical repertoire. The sculptures have often been constructed from readymades but sculpted out of their original forms and combined to resemble figurative sculpture.

“What is important to note, though, and this also relates to the idea of cannibalization, is that everything we take in is digested in a very specifically Brazilian way. I am altering most of the objects I use, so they are not readymades in the classic Duchampian sense. They are for the most part fairly universal, but they also carry the specific context of where they come from—a particular aesthetics and history.”

– Alexandre da Cunha in conversation with Jens Hoffman, CCA Wattis

The new works, constructed from domestic objects such as furniture, mops, walking sticks, household objects, pots, planters and concrete, have a patina of age or human touch already and in carving these objects from their original skin Da Cunha is literally making a new object from an existing one. One effect of these new sculptures is to refer to ambiguous unknown structures, which look like fictional mechanical devices, or improvised tools, but retain an element of ambiguity as to their possible use value.

Alexandre da Cunha’s new works explore two strands of interest, references to art history and the idea of display, and the notion of cultural tourism, and the signs and symbols that become representative of a place or experience. In re-appropriating stereotypical iconography adorned upon found fabrics da Cunha re- emphasizes the often neglectful use of these images in areas of identity, consumerism and taste

Alexandre da Cunha is currently exhibiting in Passengers at the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco until August, 2008.  He has two forthcoming solo exhibitions at Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo and also at Sommer and Kohl in Berlin.

For further information or images please contact Martin Rasmussen: +44 (0)20 7729 9888 or: martin@vilmagold.com