Artists: Catarina Leitão

Original Artworks from the Artist Catarina Leitão

These works are included in the Territory exhibition at Armazem Das Artes Alcobaca

The exhibition text for the artist is included below: 

CATARINA LEITÃO

b. 1970, Stuttgart, Germany
INVISIBLE AGREEMENTS

Portuguese artist Catarina Leitão has built a practice around questioning the assumptions we use to understand the world around us.

A leaf looks natural. A machine looks manufactured. A landscape belongs to nature, while a building belongs to us. We make these connections so quickly that we rarely notice ourselves making them.

Catarina Leitão is interested in what happens when those familiar categories begin to mix. Forms in her work can appear organic and manufactured at the same time. Something may remind us of a plant without being a plant, or look engineered without having a clear function.

This Territory is INVISIBLE AGREEMENTS.

We learn many of these visual connections without ever being taught them directly. Green can suggest nature. A branching form can suggest growth. A diagram can suggest facts or explanation. Catarina uses these familiar signals, then mixes them together or puts them where we don't expect them.

Here in Territory, Leitão explores these ideas through sculpture and drawing. A drawing may resemble a diagram, specimen, map or scientific illustration. Forms are isolated, compared and numbered, as if we should be able to identify them.

Except often we can't.

Her sculptures play a similar game. Something looks like a branch, but is clearly fabricated. Something hangs like a leaf, but could just as easily be a machine part. Her work relies on these invisible agreements to make us question the very same agreements.