Newcastle University

Alexandre Da Cunha’s work plays with everyday utilitarian objects using and re-using objects and stripping them of their original use value and combining them to create new structures. Cunha's use of these materials is however loaded with reference to high-modernist art through structure, pattern and motif. The artist has constructed new works, from domestic objects such as furniture, mops, walking sticks, household objects, pots, planters and concrete.

Each piece, already having a patina of age or human touch, is transformed into a new object, resulting in ambiguous unknown structures, which look like fictional mechanical devices, or improvised tools, but retain an element of ambiguity as to their possible use value. A plinth or pedestal is incorporated as part of the work, examining classical ideas of presentation of the sculpture and relation to where the piece begins or ends.

Alexandre da Cunha was born in Rio de Janeiro and currently lives and works in London. He is cuurently showing at Palazzo delle Arti Napoli in the exhibition “los Impoliticos’. Recently he had a solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in London. He has exhibited in numerous group shows including ‘Ordinary Revolutions’, Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen (2009), ‘An Unruly History of the Readymade’, Mexico (2008); ‘Passengers’, Wattis Institute San Francisco (2008); ‘Nova Arte Nova’, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil CCBB, Rio de Janeiro (2006) and the 50th Venice Biennale, ‘The Structure of Survival’, Venice (2003).