Alexandre da Cunha’s sculptures and wall-mounted works uncover the poetry and beauty of everyday objects, liberating them from their cultural uses even as he draws forth their essential connections with patterns of consumption and labor. The artist plays within and against the language of art historical movements such as Arte Povera and Tropicália to craft elegant, vibrantly inventive propositions for alternative modes of viewing and understanding. Da Cunha’s compositions, which are rooted in the history of the readymade, are formed through carefully balanced relationships between color, form, and material, generating a fractilated universe of rich association between art-making, daily life, and philosophical concerns. Through the symbolic transformation of recognisable functional objects into formal sculptures and reliefs, da Cunha’s work oscillates between connection and disconnection from their source materials’ everyday and often throw-away status.
Working between São Paulo and London, da Cunha’s unique point of view is amplified by his hyper urban surroundings. The artist’s lyrical use of concrete, a material crucial to his vernacular, emanates from his ruminations on traditions of construction, architecture and modernism in addition to the material’s ubiquity within his native Brazil. Da Cunha’s monumental concrete installations gesture towards an industrial urban landscape, a confluence of city infrastructure and domestic design. Typically constructed from pipes and other connective mechanisms, da Cunha’s sculptures express transitional states, notions of flux, and the fluidity of movement across both time and space. In These Days, da Cunha debuts three new spectacularly choreographed sculptures with looping forms derived from industrially produced manholes. Despite their apparent heft, da Cunha’s concrete installations are playful and serene, forging an alluring dissonance between their intended quotidian application and their artfully constructed aesthetic presentation.