ERNESTO NETO

Bringing together a new body of work, the exhibition expands on the artist’s longstanding exploration of the interdependence between bodies, materials, and living systems. A monumental corten steel sculpture inhabits the main gallery in Barra Funda alongside cotton- and wool-crochet sculptures that extend across the walls in dialogue with the architecture. Meanwhile, the Jardins space is transformed into a forest, featuring works made from crochet, braided ropes, ceramics, and semiprecious stones. Spanning both venues, this body of work assumes organic configurations that evoke insects, roots, mountains, and other hybrid forms, proposing sculpture as a field of relationships, movement, and continuous transformation.

At the core of the exhibition is a new series of wall-based sculptures that Neto calls InsePás: tensile, cellular structures that extend across walls, ceilings, and architectural corners like living organisms or flows of energy moving through space. Developed from the artist’s earlier investigations into suspension, balance, and relational structures, these works deepen his understanding of sculpture as something activated through encounter rather than existing as a static form. In dialogue with them is a monumental corten steel sculpture whose branching structure simultaneously evokes a mountainous landscape and a living body sustained through relations of balance and mutual support.

Taken together, the works transform the gallery into a permeable ecosystem rather than a neutral exhibition space. Sculpture, drawing, writing, and sound come together as expressions of a worldview shaped by cosmological thought, ecological interdependence, and embodied knowledge. Rather than maintaining distinctions between nature and culture, or between architecture and the body, the exhibition proposes an environment in which human and nonhuman forms coexist in continuous exchange, reaffirming Neto’s understanding that life is sustained through relationships, reciprocity, and the shared vitality of all beings.