Leda Catunda

Since the 1980s, Leda Catunda has constructed a visual lexicon shifting between mass culture and craftwork, employing abstract painting and sculpture as much as pop art’s collage and appropriation procedures. Making use of the imagistic voraciousness of our time, the artist creates haptic works – stuffed, frilled and sewn on domestic materials – making the support itself into content. The artist’s insistence on manual making nonetheless allows for an intimate dimension, alluding to a simultaneously familiar and personal atmosphere. With the means at hand and conserving the traces of her process, Catunda’s “soft world” insinuates a critique of the affirmation of identity through consumerism, reworking textile waste and the mechanisms of commercial culture.

Among her recent solo exhibitions are Paisagem selvagem, Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2024); Leda Catunda: EUFORIA, ICA Milano, Milan, Italy (2023); Geography, Bortolami Gallery, New York, USA (2022); Judy Chicago & Leda Catunda, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brasil (2022); Leda Catunda & Alejandra Seeber, MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (2021); Projeto Parede | Paisagem moderna, MAM – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil (2019); I Love You Baby, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brasil (2016) e Leda Catunda e o gosto dos outros, Galpão Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo, Brasil (2015). She has also participated in the group shows El Dorado, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2023); Re-materialized: the stuff that matters, Kaufmann Repetto, Milan, Italy (2023); Utopias e Distopias, MAM-BA – Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brasil (2022); 1981–2021 Arte Contemporânea Brasileira na Coleção Andrea e José Olympio Pereira, CCBB – Centro Cultural do Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2021); A máquina do mundo: Arte e indústria no Brasil 1901 – 2021, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil (2021); Casa Carioca, MAM – Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2020) e Cities in Dust, Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2020).

The artist has works incluided in important public collections, such as The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA; Blanton Museum of Art – The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, USA; Centro Wilfredo Lam, Havana, Cuba; Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; Fundación ARCO, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; MAC-USP – Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna da Bahia, Salvador, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; MON – Museu Oscar Niemeyer, Curitiba, Brasil; MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands and Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Toyota, Japan.