Lehmann is pleased to present The Word for World is Poem | A Palavra para Mundo é Poema, the first solo exhibition at the gallery by Paris-based artist Ángela Jiménez Durán (b. 1996, Madrid, ES).

The exhibition’s title draws inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal science fiction novel The Word for World is Forest, in which an alien language uses a single word to encompass both "world" and "forest". Borrowing from this ecological and linguistic overlap, Jiménez Durán constructs a territory where poetry becomes the foundational principle for world-building.

Spanning painting, sculpture, and installation, the exhibition draws visitors into a choreography of entities and poems, invoking the artist’s ongoing investigation into the four elements, material transformation, and geological fiction. By engaging with the agency of matter, Jiménez Durán blurs the boundaries between the human and the non-human, and her work unfolds as a discontinuous narrative in which materialities and fictional elements intertwine to imagine uncertain futures.

"The sentences running across taut linen, the seemingly damp and shiny matter of the summoned beings, the colour of a full moon, and the clay in raw, muscular earthenware. All of this is Ángela Jiménez Durán revealing her song to us. And, to sing it to us, she chooses as title The Word for World is Poem, in direct company of Ursula K. Le Guin's book, The Word for World Is Forest, because opening ourselves is also reuniting with those we feel close to us, and that always surpasses the conventions of space and time.

We can then read the exhibition from three acts: the world presented by loved ones, ancestral beings invited for this moment; the integration of the verb into the linen canvases, like a choreographed aquatic landscape; and the inner world, which erupts from the lower floor and feeds existence with vigour."

FILIPA DA ROCHA NUNES

Excerpt from the exhibition text