Mirroring Nature

Brigida Baltar, Jonathas de Andrade, Amparo de la Sota, Bruno Dunley, Gego, Cao Guimaraes, Davila & Portillo, Maria Klabin, Karin Lambrecht, Manoela Medeiros, Berna Reale, Gerardo Rosales, Marcelo Silveira, Amelia Toledo, Cassio Vasconcellos, Laura Vinci

Nara Roesler New York presents Mirroring Nature, a group exhibition bringing together works by sixteen artists. The exhibition considers nature not merely as a subject or landscape, but as a constellation of phenomena, forces, and forms of life through which the world is structured and continually transformed.

In Amelia Toledo's sculptures from the Dragao cantor series, Laura Vinci's Folhas avulsas #1, Galhinho, and Muda, Manoela Medeiros's phytoliths, and Marcelo Silveira's fire-marked cajacatinga wood, mineral and plant matter meet in distinct states of transformation. Meanwhile, Brigida Baltar's documentation of A coleta da neblina and the embroideries from A pele da planta, together with Conexiones, a hand embroidery by Amparo de la Sota, and Gego's Drawing Without Paper #11, transform the surface into a space where time, gesture, and matter become embedded, evoking rhizomatic, synaptic, cellular, or inner organic configurations.

Through photography, the exhibition brings together different scales of observation. In Clinamen, Cao Guimaraes revisits the notion of 'minimal deviation' developed by the Greek philosopher Epicurus to explain the dynamism of atoms, whereby small, unpredictable shifts in movement make the formation of worlds possible. In O espirito das aguas, Jonathas de Andrade begins with the proximity between fish and fishermen to expand his investigation into the relationship between the human body and aquatic environments. Through themes of life, death, water, air, and contact between species, the work reveals a world where affection and violence are intertwined.

In Viagem Pitoresca pelo Brasil #142, Cassio Vasconcellos revisits the tradition of artistic and scientific expeditions that documented a then little-known territory, questioning the ways in which the Atlantic Forest was framed and transformed into landscape. Nebula, an intricate and complex weaving by Davila & Portillo, reveals through its astrophysical title both the clouds of celestial dust and the starry night that modern artists transformed into an all-over visual language.

In visual arts, nature does not only appear as an external world to be reproduced, but as a repertoire of materials, forms, and processes. Natural forms and materials can be either figured, as in Trofeu III by Bruno Dunley, operating within the very construction of the image, or physically used and transformed, as in Fragmento, where Karin Lambrecht combines pigments in acrylic emulsion and vegetal charcoal on canvas, bringing organic matter onto the surface of the work. Nature appears as representational and mimetic in Maria Klabin's observations of fruits and landscapes, or as symbolic and allegorical in the works on paper Culebra y llanten, Icaco, Planta 1, Hormiga culona, Lineas cruzadas, Fence-A, and Frailejones, in which Gerardo Rosales brings together plants, snakes, and insects in images that combine observation, popular culture, fabulation, and a contemporary queer imaginary.