Duarte Sequeira presents Vanessa da Silva for Frieze Sculpture, running from 14 September until 31 October 2021 at the English Gardens in The Regent’s Park, London.
Exploring ideas of transmutation, corporeality and the primordial, Vanessa da Silva’s Muamba Grove series presents a combination of abstraction and figuration, resulting in forms that are at once unrecognisable yet strangely familiar. Colour and scale play a significant part within the works. Taking into consideration the interaction between the human body and nature, the works explore the relationship between object and body, body and nature that, in turn, unfolds an extended narrative between object and viewer.
The forms of da Silva’s sculptures are often produced in tandem, or in reaction to the compositions she intuitively carves, she identifies each sculpture as ‘unrooted bodies’, genderless, neither human nor part of nature, but as hybrids that are in a constant state of mutation, metamorphosing into something still unknown.
This series of sculptures were produced in 2019 and exhibited for the launch of Duarte Sequeira’s Gallery Sculpture Park alongside a performance in collaboration with Arte Total, the city’s local dance company.