Alexandre da Cunha: Broken

Thomas Dane Gallery is delighted to present a solo exhibition of Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969, Rio de Janeiro) featuring new sculptures and works on paper. These new works expand on da Cunha’s longstanding engagement with found objects, incorporating new aspects of his studio practice and experimenting with strategies of display through spatial interventions in the gallery. Titled Broken, the show will encompass ideas of redundancy, fragmentation and disrepair as generative and productive forces.

While many of the appropriated objects remain immediately recognisable – a chair, hat, bottle or feather – in other instances they are presented in broken and fragmented states that reflect an exercise of reconfiguration, in which the habitual is transformed and the act of ‘breaking’ – both as fracture and discontinuation – serves as a mode of reframing and rebuilding. This transitory sensibility is reflected in the modest scale of many of the works, which stand in contrast to previous large-scale concrete sculptures by da Cunha.

Upended, specimen-like bottles contain soft or organic materials, frozen in time by concrete which seals their hourglass-like containers. Items often discarded at the end of their short lives – brushes, broken fragments of furniture or clothing – are made permanent and eternal by their unbreakable bases. There is a dark sense of humour in many of these works; as these objects are solidified and made permanent, they are also trapped and imprisoned, denied their usual cycles of decay and disappearance.