Alexander and Bonin is pleased to announce Tandem, a project curated by Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, an independent curator based in Lisbon who has worked with both public institutions and private collections. Teixeira de Freitas has organized exhibitions at the Sala de Arte Santander, Madrid (2019); MAAT, Lisbon (2017); and the Freud Museum, London (2013), among others. She has also been part of the curatorial team for Coimbra’s Anozero Biennale (2017) and the Marrakech Biennale (2009).

Tandem will consist of a series of five exhibitions over the coming year that will run parallel to the gallery program, each one a dialogue between two distinct artistic practices. The first iteration, with Gabriel Abrantes and Belén Uriel, opened on March 8th.

Belén Uriel’s glass and iron sculptures, on display in the Staircase Gallery, present a series of mass-produced items that have been cast in glass and installed on colorful iron structures. A chair is present via the marks it leaves on molten glass, while a meticulously cast garbage can lid perches flower-like atop a green tripod. By reducing these objects into their constituent parts and divorcing them from their original use, Uriel reveals a domestic poetry and offers the viewer a renewed intimacy with their surroundings. The artist’s practice is often driven by her ongoing interest in design history, commercial displays and the interface between the body and everyday objects.

In "A Brief History of Princess X," on view in the video gallery, Gabriel Abrantes charts a picaresque journey through the intellectual tumults of the turn of the century. The short film starts with a wry meditation on Brancusi’s Princess X, an abstract, futuristic bronze portrait of Princess Marie Bonaparte. Abrantes brings the viewer through the creation of the work, its scandalous reception due to its perceived phallic nature, and the Princess’s own radical research into sexuality and her relationship with Freud. In doing so, Abrantes plays with notions of authorship, changing social mores, and the delicate tension between the artist, the viewer, and the historian.