Get ready for an explosion of colour this September in Dubai, as Leila Heller Gallery in Alserkal Avenue announces Portuguese artist Ana D’Castro’s solo exhibition titled “Florgasm”.
D’Castro’s alluring compositions of colours and brush strokes are all about the artist’s tridimensional fusion of art, architecture and time, in a series of works featuring heavy layered texturing and rich tones complementing each other. Fresh off her showing in New York, D’Castro is returning to Dubai next month with an exhibition at Leila Heller from September 7.
Born in 1984 in Portugal, D’Castro studied architecture to earn her master’s degree and went on to work for the award-winning Swiss architectural studio Herzog & De Meuron where she participated in projects in Brazil and the US, or more specifically, the Pérez Art Museum Miami and the São Paulo Cultural Complex. She has lived in Brazil, Singapore, France, Switzerland and now the UAE, and D’Castro defines her work as a symbiosis of art and architecture.
“Coming from an architectural background, my eye is subconsciously trained to see differently my surroundings,” she said. “When looking at a flower as a singular element I intuitively search for her architectural features such as in the format of the petals and pods or the veins and framework of the leaves. Not the decorative aspect of a flower but mostly her timeless structural aspect. Taking this as a base I start analyzing the full spectrum of a flowery garden or a wild forest, and recreating these mental frames into my canvas by following the elementary principles of architecture: leveling the soil (first layer of paint), structural foundation grid (dripping paint), coating and finishing (impasto). “
Previously D’Castro has sold out her shows in a single day and this Dubai exhibition starts on September 7 following on from her New York showing. D’Castro was also represented in the Portuguese pavilion at Expo 2020, and she created the first ever outdoor paintings in the UAE in the DIFC Sculpture Park.
