Lehmann presents the first solo exhibition by Maria Paz Aires (b. 1998, Porto), bringing together a recent body of work that traverses sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation.

Through the tension between various materials, Paz’s practice explores the fluidity of the body and identity, observing and articulating symbioses between the human, the animal, and the vegetable, whilst seeking new ways to understand life and the generosity of the planet.

With a degree in Sculpture from FBAUL and an MA from the Institut Art Gender Nature (HGK) in Basel, Paz is currently — and until 26 May — an artist-in-residence at CAM – Centro de Arte Moderna Gulbenkian, in Lisbon.

His exhibition history includes presentations at major institutions and venues such as Galeria Municipal do Porto (in a duet with Joan Jonas), Museu do Caramulo (in collaboration with Culturgest), Bienal da Maia, and Galeria Zé dos Bois, alongside international exhibitions in Basel, Rome, and at the Sarria Triennial in Spain. His work is part of prominent public collections, including the Caixa Geral de Depósitos and the Porto Municipal Collection. Together with Joana da Conceição, they form the Xeno-fera collective.

"(...) The territory of celebration is the territory of eccentricity—of that which lies outside the centre—of marginality, of avowed laterality, of visible invisibility, of non-normative richness, of indistinction, and of shared construction.

We might venture to suggest that this is the territory inhabited by the beings imagined by Maria Paz Aires. The imagined visions he materialises with each new public presentation bring us closer to a full and richly diverse universe, one in constant reformulation. These are mutable, multiple, dismemberable beings, the product of simple operations, of fusions, repetitions, and superimpositions, of various articulations and interpenetrations. They are beings that arise from an immense desire for contamination, from a permanent expansion of their formal possibilities, from living and profoundly free experiments. Their impermanent and f luid condition allows them to assume different instances of existence; it allows fracture, fold, separation, division, and multiplication; it allows changes of state, but also changes of scale; and it affirms with confidence that their present condition is traversed by the entire history of their many past conditions. (...)"

ANA ANACLETO

Excerpt of the exhibition text