Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves a territory: nature. A nature catalogued, manipulated, planted, renamed and transported through the continuous research of forests and gardens. For Albergaria, these places constitute systems of representation and descriptive mechanisms that synthesize the set of beliefs that we use to represent the natural world.
The images of forests, gardens, plants and seeds employed by the artist are used as devices that reveal processes of cultural change through which visions on nature are produced. Mediated by systems of representation, they suggest different versions of what we perceive as a landscape – a complex system of material structures, visual hierarchies and cultural constructions that define the framework of our visual field.
In the form of a drawing cabinet, (…) a single species (…) presents works created by Albergaria after an expedition in the Amazon, coordinated by botanical researcher Lúcia Lohmann, of the University of São Paulo (USP), in 2016, which traveled the Negro and Branco rivers and their banks.
The solo exhibition also includes works created after visiting other Brazilian biomes, such as the one typical of the cerrado region in the state of Goiás, visited by the artist in 2019, during a trip that was part of the research process for the exhibition Oréades, presented later at Embassy of Portugal in Brasília in 2021.
Albergaria takes the title of the exhibition, (…) a single species (…), from the book “Paintings of Nature: an anthology”, by German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humbolt (1769-1859). According to her, Humbolt’s phrase suggests the idea of the impoverishment of species that do not interbreed, something akin to monocultures. This concept was incorporated by Albergaria and is seen in the series Sementes (2021), consisting of 16 drawings. The regular pattern given to the organic forms of the seeds attributes a canonical character to the representation of the seeds that Albergaria observed in the cerrado in 2019.
Gabriela Albergaria’s work involves a territory: nature. A nature catalogued, manipulated, planted, renamed and transported through the continuous research of forests and gardens. For Albergaria, these places constitute systems of representation and descriptive mechanisms that synthesize the set of beliefs that we use to represent the natural world.
The images of forests, gardens, plants and seeds employed by the artist are used as devices that reveal processes of cultural change through which visions on nature are produced. Mediated by systems of representation, they suggest different versions of what we perceive as a landscape – a complex system of material structures, visual hierarchies and cultural constructions that define the framework of our visual field.
In the form of a drawing cabinet, (…) a single species (…) presents works created by Albergaria after an expedition in the Amazon, coordinated by botanical researcher Lúcia Lohmann, of the University of São Paulo (USP), in 2016, which traveled the Negro and Branco rivers and their banks.
The solo exhibition also includes works created after visiting other Brazilian biomes, such as the one typical of the cerrado region in the state of Goiás, visited by the artist in 2019, during a trip that was part of the research process for the exhibition Oréades, presented later at Embassy of Portugal in Brasília in 2021.
Albergaria takes the title of the exhibition, (…) a single species (…), from the book “Paintings of Nature: an anthology”, by German geographer and naturalist Alexander von Humbolt (1769-1859). According to her, Humbolt’s phrase suggests the idea of the impoverishment of species that do not interbreed, something akin to monocultures. This concept was incorporated by Albergaria and is seen in the series Sementes (2021), consisting of 16 drawings. The regular pattern given to the organic forms of the seeds attributes a canonical character to the representation of the seeds that Albergaria observed in the cerrado in 2019.
