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The Gallery of Casa Dell'Arte is dedicated primarily to Portuguese and Turkish artists and aims to become a home for artistic dialogue and collaborations. Through the new Club House in Lisbon, Casa dell’Arte connects its artistic operations in Turkey - such as curated exhibitions, artist talks, artist residency program, creating new audience for local and international artists.
 
Casa dell’Arte Gallery is proud to present its debut show, “Time Capsule” by the Portuguese artist Sofia Leitão opening on 31st of January from 6 to 9 pm.
 
The concept of permanence and transience, in other words, the complex relationship between what is preserved and what disappears is the core around which Leitão’s work develops. Assuming that everything related to the passage of time has a magical quality, the artist’s aim is to explore the issues around the subject’s inherent aesthetic beauty and its ambivalent relationship with finitude.
 
The exhibition features a selection of the artist’s oeuvre produced between the years 2011 - 2019. The series “Time Capsule”, which also gives its name to the exhibition, comprises of detailed oil pastel paintings of minerals on paper, and deals with the idea of preserving a piece of the present in the future. According to Leitão, just like the minerals represented in her paintings, art has the power to carry a frozen moment into the future.
 
The paintings will be accompanied by five sculptures from two different series. The first four sculptures come from “Unweave The Rainbow”, which borrows its name from the poem Lamia by English poet John Keats, and is inspired by the writings of French intellectual and mystical materialist Roger Caillois, who in his work Writing of Stones praises the “kaleidoscopic metamorphosis” of phenomena such as flames and waterfalls. The sculptures whimsically incorporate overtly artificial material such as mirrors and sequins in order to recreate the effect the “phenomenologically marvellous” often inspires. The last sculpture, Grotto #2, functions in the same vein, playing on the ambiguity between the artificial and the natural with its choice of materials ranging from textile elements to amethysts.