Almine Rech Gallery is pleased to announce 'Construction / Destruction', a group exhibition that brings together the work of six international artists active between the 1960s and today. Emerging from divergent contemporary trajectories across the globe, their work explores notions of destruction, construction and transformation, as forces of cyclical renewal to define the connections to, or away from, their own cultural past. The destructive tendency is crucial to the history of modern and contemporary art. However, presented here, these acts are no more violent than they are transformational, looking to develop dynamic visual and spatial relationships, or to construct multi-layered experiences, which engage the artist, the material and the agency of the viewer.
Together, the works of Joel Shapiro and Fernanda Gomes create a new landscape of form and meaning, which insists upon a phenomenological experience of space. Based in Rio de Janeiro, the work of Fernanda Gomes emerges from the traditions of Brazilian Constructivism and the Neo-Concrete. Created in situ, her installations reflect upon a process of discovery, assimilation and appropriation. Starkly minimal in her aesthetic approach, Gomes extracts discarded objects from the world – such as cotton thread, nails, wood, plastic bags, wire, or paintbrushes – most of which she paints the color white. Choreographing barely noticeably interventions among the gallery’s walls and physical space, her work requires extended observation as she poetically manifests fragments from the world. “The state of things on their way to disappearing appeals to me,” she explains, “they have a strange density in contrast to their precarious materiality.”[…]