Caetano de Almeida and Gabriel Sierra at Galeria Luisa Strina

Galeria Luisa Strina opens its 2025 programme with two solo exhibitions that put the limits of perception, materiality and representation under tension: the Brazilian Caetano de Almeida and the Colombian Gabriel Sierra occupy the exhibition space at the same time, prompting a compelling dialogue between tradition and experiment.

Caetano de Almeida revisits historical memory and artistic tradition in a body of work shaped by his recent time in Rome. Drawing on baroque architecture and Italian visual codes, the artist builds labyrinthine surfaces where ambiguity and irony reconfigure the notion of form and temporality. Works such as "Loggia" (2024) and "Algicida" (2023) challenge the fixity of image and time, opening a critical questioning of the dogmas of art history.

‍

For the critic and researcher Mateus Nunes, Caetano de Almeida's compositions call us to inhabit a limit-space: "where pictorial matter meets historical narrative, and geometry, which once sought to order the world, now dissolves into labyrinths of perception and ambiguity".

In his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Gabriel Sierra investigates the border zones between image and object, questioning the substance of the visible: does the essence of the image reside in the physical object, in the photographic representation or in the perception of the viewer? Through objects, films and images, his enquiry revisits the visual codes that structure both daily life and the world of art. By dissolving the distinction between matter and abstraction, Sierra suggests that the tangible world is inseparable from the fictions of the imagination.

‍

‍

The show's title echoes that multiplicity of meanings, evoking at once a structural fault in architecture and a psychoanalytic concept, in an enquiry into the instability of forms. "An image is an image, just as an object is an object. But could an image be an object, or the other way round?", the artist provokes.

For Luisa Strina, the exhibitions complement each other in forming an expanded field of aesthetic experiment: "Gabriel Sierra leads us to reflect on the thresholds between object and image, while Caetano de Almeida revisits art history in order to subvert it, opening new possibilities of perception. Both reinforce the gallery's commitment to widening the borders of contemporary art".

On 15 February at 11am, the public will have the chance to take part in a free guided visit with Mateus Nunes, author of the critical text that accompanies Caetano de Almeida's exhibition.

‍