For the fifth edition of London Gallery Weekend (6 - 8 June), The Approach is pleased to present Anderson Borba Secret Ceremony, the Brazilian artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, comprising new sculptures and paper collages.
Borba lives and works in both London and São Paulo. Through his practice, he seeks textural ambiguity, twisting and expanding the material and conceptual possibilities of wood, creating autonomous totems or hanging wall reliefs.
A distinctive feature of Borba’s approach is the synthesis of traditional techniques with contemporary modes of expression, such as digitally manipulated images where the boundaries between image and material blur. Borba’s practice involves negotiating with materials to determine the final form of his works. The artist carves, burns, paints, presses, and manipulates these elements in a process-driven construction, resulting in rough, cracked, yet seductive body shapes.
Influenced by both the historical canon of sculpture and the self-taught artists of Brazil’s interior, Borba operates within a complex interplay between concept and experience, displacing and unfolding the physical body into an anthropomorphic abstraction. His sculptures, marked by a strong sense of physicality, often assume near-human scales, gazing impassively at those who observe them.
