Mendes Wood DM was founded in 2010 by partners Felipe Dmab, Matthew Wood and Pedro Mendes with the intent to exhibit international and Brazilian artists in a context conducive to critical dialogue and cross-pollination. Central to the gallery’s program is a concern for regional difference and individuation while fostering cosmopolitanism and collaboration. Inspired by a belief that artistic practices broaden the scope of human agency and have the power to both touch and change the world, Mendes Wood DM cultivates a program premised on conceptualism, political resistance and intellectual rigor.
Ocula Report Dhaka Art Summit 2020: Seismic Movements By Radha Mahendru, Dhaka Seismic Movements, the fifth Dhaka Art Summit, plotted movements, solidarities, and exchanges across the Global South with over 500 artists, scholars, curators, and thinkers.
Ocula Report At Art Taipei, Galleries Adapt to Regional Politics By Sam Gaskin, Tapiei In Taipei, the artwork that said most about the contemporary art market's fraught situation in East Asia was not at the 26th Art Taipei (18–21 October 2019), but across town at the Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab, a publicly funded art park established in Taiwan's former Air Force Command Headquarters in 2018. Chin Cheng-Te's Tender Soul –...
Ocula Conversation Otobong Nkanga By Stephanie Bailey Otobong Nkanga has developed a practice that reads the world on material terms and maps out how the body fits into a shared, earthly narrative. Her 2012 project Contained Measures of a Kolanut followed the artist's research into the library of CIRAD, the French Agricultural Research Centre for International Development in Paris' Bois De...
Ocula Report documenta 14: the view from Athens By Maria Nicolacopoulou, Athens documenta 14's mammoth effort to include 40 something venues and over 160 artists in its exhibition in Athens (8 April–16 July 2017) is a testimony of the institution's struggle to infiltrate a city with a weighted ancient and modern past, a turbulent present, and an uncertain future. There is a push-pull relationship between inside and outside in...
Related Press Solange Pessoa at Mendes Wood DM 23 March 2020, Contemporary Art Daily Mendes Wood DM Brussels is pleased to present In the Sun and the Shade, the first European solo show of works by the Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa, coinciding with her acclaimed first solo institutional exhibition in the United States, currently on view at Ballroom Marfa. Utilizing the entirety of the Brussels gallery space, the show includes...
Related Press Sonia Gomes’s Sewn and Twisted Traces of History 5 March 2020, Hyperallergic BADEN-BADEN, Germany — Using recycled textiles, driftwood, and furniture, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes creates oversized biomorphic sculptures that are palpably corporeal. In her Museum Frieder Burda exhibition I Rise – I’m a Black Ocean, Leaping and Wide, “Lona”(2010) takes the form of a dream catcher made from scraps of lace with a floral...
Related Press Anna Bella Geiger Probes the Nature of Brazilian Identity 25 February 2020, Frieze For over 60 years, the Brazilian artist Anna Bella Geiger has fluidly traversed painting, sculpture, video, installation and photography, exploring systems and frameworks as varied as the human body, self-representation, mathematical equations, cartography, geography, the art world and varied socio-political issues. This survey comprises 190...
Related Press Solange Pessoa Invites Nature to Take Over 20 February 2020, Frieze One of the most striking things about Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa’s exhibition In the Sun and the Shade at Mendes Wood DM is how effectively it intersects with both the natural world and its local setting. The former was to be expected: Pessoa’s paintings and sculptures often feature natural materials—including leaves, roots, eggs...
