Frieze London 2021

André Romão
Carlos Bunga
Céline Condorelli
José Pedro Croft

Booth G04
13 – 17 October

For the upcoming edition of Frieze London, Galeria Vera Cortês is delighted to present a project which considers the idea of space, architecture and the bodies within it. Thus, in the booth will be staged a group of “bodies” by André Romão, enclosed by Carlos Bunga, Céline Condorelli and José Pedro Croft architectural and spatial reflections.

The sculptures of André Romão – one of the artists participating in the last edition of the Liverpool Biennial – are in a continuous metamorphosis, located in a territory where normal interactions between bodies and entities are suspended or blurred, at the border between human and animal and the natural and artificial and questioning notions of economics, eroticism, violence, and appropriation.

Artist bio

Through the employment of mass-produced materials, Carlos Bunga establishes a dialogue with the existing architectural spaces resulting in ephemeral structures creating a double effect: to rethink our experience in relation with the space itself, as well as arousing the transient and delicate nature of urban structures.

Artist bio

Current exhibitions:
– Mind awake, body asleep. Secession, Vienna
– Terra Ferma. Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea, UK

Bunga’s interest in the intersection between the past and the present was the key of the previous works ‘Intersection Series’, in which the perimeter of the piece as well as the wall was white, constructing the illusion of a non-space where the work was central and the context neutralized. In Before the White Cube, Bunga chooses the interior color of the piece but uses the wall colors of Prado Museum for the perimeter, in an attempt to bring social and political context as well as other issues that were once excluded from inside the white cube. The work exists in between architecture, painting and sculpture attempting to confront and rethink the conventional ideas of disciplines, display and installation.

Céline Condorelli’s practice arises from developing possibilities for ways of living and working together. In particular, her practice is concerned with concepts of support, realizing critical models towards exhibitions as well as public spaces.

Artist bio

Current exhibitions:
– Elmington Estate Playground, South London Gallery, UK
– All Our Tomorrows, Too. Commissioned by Forensic Architecture for Investigative Commons, European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, Berlin
– Another Reality. Eastside Projects, Birmingham
– Corps à Corps, with Pete Shields and Dirk Yates, Sculpture Garden. IMA Brisbane, Australia. Awarded the Art and Architecture Award by the Australian Institute of Architects

This work speaks of limits: both those which determine the contours of our movements, those which prevent us from physical access to a place, and those which we are authorized to cross. Indirectly, it speaks of the nature of the spaces to which specific functions are assigned. Limits to play implies the inability to participate, and therefore the exclusion of certain members of society, here women on sports grounds which were prohibited to them. Each sport ground bears the date at which women were first allowed to play it in public.

These series present case studies that Condorelli has been using within her ongoing research into ideas of the playground as a tool to achieve social and subjective change within the city fabric. Playgrounds or play objects articulate certain ideas of what playing, childhood and therefore culture are. On a very direct level, the encounter with the built environment that playing describes is a physical one, grappling and measuring oneself with and against the world as it is, touching, climbing, holding, testing the possibilities of that encounter, figuring out how form can be used.

This drawings introduces part of Lina Bo Bardi’s vision for the Museum of Art of São Paulo demanding museums to take responsibility for public and popular programmes, as well as for being playable in some way by including a playground as part of their programme.

These sculptures are models of some of the architect Van Eyck’s isometric drawings, which were studies for playgrounds he designed for the city of Amsterdam. Resembling children’s toy building blocks, one can engage with these works in the same way children could use Van Eyck’s play sculptures, exploring how each object could be used. Céline Condorelli asks how contemporary art can be politicised -and become more generous- by encouraging the public creative potential, using ideas about public space taken from architecture theory where questions about our shared social world comes first.

José Pedro Croft essentially integrates his sculptural practice with the drawings, displayed in the booth, which are unfolding different plans and depths engaging the viewer to rethink about the space.

Artist bio

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Frieze Sculpture 2021: José Pedro Croft

The Regent’s Park, London
14 September – 31 October

“This work is about issues of geometry, how they order the world, creating a nature, other, landscape. A monumental construction, colour panes in fragile balance, and imminent collapse.”
— José Pedro Croft

“José Pedro Croft’s (Porto, 1957) sculpture comes from a work on the memory of collective space, the evocation and criticism of the idea of monument, has been evolving over the last two decades, to create sculptural objects that ponder the relationship between the beholder’s body and the architectural space. His sculptures, whether when they incorporate pre-existing entities of our daily lives (such as tables, chairs, stools or bookshelves), or when they assert themselves as large abstract creations, often for public space, always start from an awareness of the material and its corporeality, as well as the way in which the beholder is physically, corporally and perceptively affected.”
— Delfim Sardo

“The work that Croft conceived for Regent’s Park is a colossal set of six panes of painted iron (four) and glass (two) that articulate as a huge portico through which one can wander. The set of panes painted in white, red, orange, blue and green alternate in matte and glossy surfaces, complexifying the effect of filters and light reflections provided by the glass panes, which are coloured as well.
The set rests on a steel structure, a rail that unifies the assembly and makes it float over the ground, as if its weight were irrelevant when faced with another subject: colour.”
— Delfim Sardo

Production: Artworks
Photography: Oxana Ianin

Publication on the occasion of Frieze Sculpture.
Text: Delfim Sardo
Translation: Maria Rosário Moura
Proofreading: Dália Rodrigues
3D images: João Moura
Photography: Bruno Lança, Oxana Ianin (cover)
Graphic Design: João M. Machado
Printing: Maiadouro S. A.

Digital version