Dual show by Tonico Auad Lemos and Goia Mujalli
Kupfer is proud to present A Living Confluence, a dual exhibition bringing together the works of Tonico Lemos Auad and Goia Mujalli.
Over the course of a month, the gallery will be host to a dialogue between wooden sculpture, textile and painting, exploring the porous boundaries between material transformation, organic forms, and interior worlds.
The exhibition title A Living Confluence evokes a meeting and mixing of two currents, and the space of possibility that opens up when elements traverse their boundaries. Both artists’ works invite the viewer to consider them as living systems or manifestations of organic life, rather than inert objects, inhabiting a permeable zone where wood meets thread, where timber meets with painted cells, where negative spaces and interstices draw connective lines between the materials’ shared cellular origins and intelligence. The title also hints at shared conceptual ground: both artists work with imaginative transformation (of found objects or vegetal forms) and employ layering and reconfiguration. A Living Confluence thus functions as a lens for viewing this exhibition as a space of ongoing negotiation, where form, matter, memory and imagination meet.
Tonico Lemos Auad will present a group of floor sculptures together with wall-based wooden pieces. Made with reclaimed wood, his totem-like sculptural works also integrate textile elements (handmade ropes, threads, fragments of fabric) and interventions. The reclaimed wood still bears traces of its prior lives — beams or structural supports from earlier formations — and thus his process is attentive to what already exists in the material, including prior marks, traces and histories. Repair, mending, and the idea of healing play a key role in these works. The interplay between tactile textiles and solid, memory-laden wood generates a quiet intimacy, suggesting ecosystems of material life that are also manifestations of belief.
One of the most established Brazilian artists in the UK, Tonico’s recent trajectory includes inclusion in Material Worlds: Contemporary Artists and Textiles (Hayward Gallery touring exhibition). Solo exhibitions include Unknown to the World at Cample Line, Scotland (2021) and Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo (2022), and Biblioteca at CRG, New York (2016). His work has also been included in the Gherdania Biennial (2020) and the Sharjah Biennale (2017) and is held in major collections including Tate, Zabludowicz, Instituto Inhotim, Pinacoteca de São Paulo and the FLAG Art Foundation. He is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery (UK) and Galeria Luisa Strina (Brazil).
Goia Mujalli presents a series of paintings that continue her exploration of painterly abstraction and the transformation of existing plant species into speculative, fictional spaces and forms. Working with acrylic, embroidery, fabric and stitching, Goia's paintings evoke worlds that hover between the microscopic and the panoramic, the familiar and the uncanny. Her imagery suggests imagined species of plants, fruits or evolving organisms, emerging through overlays of colour, gesture, surface texture and negative space; an interplay between what is revealed and what is withheld. Threads and embroidery function as acts of repair, tracing histories of destruction and renewal within the ecosystem, and creating fictional spaces for what is yet to become.
Goia holds an MFA in Painting from the Royal College of Art (2017) and a BA at the Slade School of Fine Art (2015). Selected solo shows include A Carne das Folhas (Galeria Mercedes Viegas, Rio de Janeiro, 2022), Flor de Papel (Essiccatoio Art Residency, Salento, Italy, 2021), and Labyrinths (Galeria Mercedes Viegas, Rio, 2018). In 2023, she presented the dual show A Tourist in Other People’s Reality (Patrick Heide Gallery, Brussels). Her work is included in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Fine Arts, Rio de Janeiro. She is represented by Galeria Mercedes Viegas (Brazil).
Both artists will be launching a limited edition print to accompany the exhibition, made uniquely for Kupfer. Editions will go on sale online before the exhibition.
