Two sculptures from Vanessa da Silva’s widely-acclaimed and ongoing Muamba Grove series are on displayed in the garden space of Encounter’s new gallery at 15 Rua de São Bernardo in Lisbon.
Da Silva’s work focuses on migration, identity, displacement and belonging, spanning a range of media including, sculpture, installation and performance. The inextricable link between the body and the sculptural is at the core of Da Silva’s practice, with the artist’s own figure entwined with the making of her amorphous organic forms. The artist’s practice frequently involves a process of carving sculptures concurrently, reacting to the forms intuitively as she works into their surface materials. Influenced by research into the politics of movement, many of her sculptures appear to oscillate between figuration and abstraction, fluid and solid. Constantly shape-shifting, the forms evoke an ongoing state of metamorphosis or transformation. It is the sense of movement inherent to the shapes of her sculptures that implicitly interrogates fixed notions of identity or rootedness.
The exhibition opens on the 22 September and will run until 30 December 2022.
