Vistamare is pleased to present Armonia, Joana Escoval’s second solo show with the Gallery.
The exhibition features a series of new works that are a continuous of her practice, an exploration of synergies and interconnections that takes shape in primordial forms. Metals, earth, water, wind, air and fire collaborate to form unique sculptures.
In the central room earth sculptures floating in the space, presented at the Gallery for the first time, are made of clay skillfully taken from the soils of Alentejo, south of Portugal, where Escoval spent part of her teenage years. Soils which, in recent years, have been haunted again by the intensification of industrial monoculture. This sculpture connects with a region where the land has been rapidly losing its nutrients due to over-exploitation, while becoming an empty vessel for the emergence of new organisms.
At the heart of Escoval’s work lies our relationship with the world we inhabit and the fact that, as individuals, we are ontologically interconnected with the world in its primordial state. An interconnection that she creates also in the exhibition space as, like a continuous flow, she connects the three rooms with different states of matter in flux.Fleeting and transmuting, her work invites us to walk along the edges of human consciousness through a perception of things that is more sensed and experienced than looked at.
Joana Escoval (Lisbon, 1982) ’s practice circumscribes both visual and aural in the form of sculpture, collective walks, installations, and printed matter. She founded the record label Palmario Recordings: Editions for attentive listening of field captures and translations for the ear (run together with the artist Nuno da Luz). A selection of exhibitions and projects include: Le voci della Sera, Vistamare, Milano (IT); I am molten matter, S.M.A.K, Gent, Belgium (2021); Art and Matter in Transformation, curated by Anna Daneri and Lorenzo Giusti, GAMeC Museum, Bergamo (2021); Mutações. The Last Poet , Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2020); CIAJG, Guimarães (2019); S.M.A.K. Gent, Belgium (2019); Tenderpixel, London (2019); Fiorucci Art Trust, London (2018); La Casa Encendida, Madrid (2017), Volcano Extravaganza, Stromboli (2016); Kunsthalle Lissabon and Kunsthalle Tropical, Iceland (2016); La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, Rennes (2016); MAAT, Lisbon (2015); Fondation d’entreprise Ricard, Paris (2015); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2014). She won the BES Revelação Prize in 2012 (Serralves Museum) and was nominated for the EDP Foundation New Artists Prize in 2015, in Portugal. She lives and works in Lisbon.