Condo is a large-scale collaborative exhibition of international galleries. Host galleries share their spaces with visiting galleries either by co-curating an exhibition together or dividing their galleries and allocating spaces. The initiative encourages the evaluation of existing models, pooling resources, and acting communally to propose an environment that is more conducive for experimental gallery exhibitions to take place internationally.
For this edition Martins&Montero will be hosted by Public Gallery featuring two Brazilian artists: Ana Mazzei and Rebecca Sharp.
Ana Mazzei’s work is motivated by her search for other worlds and imaginary universes and by a need to tell and re-signify stories. She is interested in the eternal and diverse relations between man and history: landscapes, architectures, fictions, theories and archives. Everything is part of a large narrative construction of man in this world. Her artworks are like pieces and fragments of myths, lives and fictions that are represented in drawings, videos, sculptures and installations. Focusing on a widely experimental practice, the artist appropriates different sensorial materials, such as felt and wood, connecting to the environments in which she navigates.
Her sculptures elaborate the environment like a kind of musical score, in which cadence and modulation are more than just metaphors: they constitute the writing of the work, like a scene to be followed by the viewer. “I feel that the composition of the pieces constitutes a direction for reading the work,” says Mazzei. According to the artist, the arrangement of the sculptures guides the viewer’s perception through a narrative of subtle weights, precarious balances, visual tensions and dialogues with the surrounding space.
Rebecca Sharp’s paintings explore the coexistence of antagonistic realities vying to manifest themselves in a context riddled with uncertainty. Each reality represents a fully-fledged place, a potential society that resists the opposing forces that attempt to suppress it. Sharp also identifies herself as a place, a fertile ground for the expression of complex worlds. Serving as representations of these vied-for spaces, her paintings run the gamut from utopian ideals to dystopian scenarios, outlining the diversity of narratives that compete for prevalence in an uncertain future.
A critical observer of the surrealist movement, Rebecca Sharp examines the particularities of women’s work, whose imagery is built on existential questions and unconscious representation. Many of her images originate through meditation, which she has been a practitioner of for 20 years. The pieces invite us to consider the complexity of time and the nonlinear nature of human experience.
