For “Arco Madrid 2025”, Galeria Leme presents works by three artists: Sandra Gamarra Heshiki, Luciano Figueiredo, and Gabriela Giroletti.
Following Sandra Gamarra’s (b. 1972) prominent presence at the 60th Venice Biennale, where she became the first artist born outside Spain to represent the Spanish Pavilion, her work revisits art history from decolonial perspectives, addressing themes such as accessibility, diversity, and sustainability within cultural institutions. Her new series, “Descubrir lo que había interés en mantener secreto” (“Discovering what there was an interest in keeping secret”), serves as a metaphor for what the concept of nature conceals from us. In this case, it is not a mantle being “removed” but a poncho—a textile typical of the Andes, revealing what the Western gaze, when contemplating the tropical landscape, also hides: the desire to extract raw materials at the cost of the destruction of the very landscape it admires.
Luciano Figueiredo (b. 1948), in turn, is recognized as one of the leading figures of Brazil’s counterculture movement of the 1970s, alongside artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Figueiredo’s works embody a sense of timelessness, stemming from his engagement with concrete art since 1984. His practice challenges the rigid and formal structure of the movement, emphasizing its experimental and non-orthodox nature. By exploring and defying the volume of the canvas, creating “relief” (the name of one of his series), his structures challenge mathematical precision. Figueiredo is driven by planar concerns, allowing three-dimensionality and color to invite contemplation of an imaginary object.
Making her debut at the fair, Gabriela Giroletti (b. 1982) navigates the tension between abstraction and figuration in painting. Her work draws from references to the natural and lyrical world, establishing a connection between lived experience and process. For Giroletti, one depends on the other, allowing her to explore the full potential of materials. What may seem simple at first glance is, in fact, a complex construction of balance between surface volume and transparency on the canvas.
While oil paint offers greater transparency, it is the mixing with acrylic paint and gel that gives her works a strange, displaced quality. In them, there is a tension between texture, gloss, depth, and volume. For Giroletti, this is part of her process of transforming material into something idiosyncratic to the artwork itself.
