CAMPLE LINE is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Anderson Borba. The Unearthed will feature sculptures in wood, including new work that Borba has made over the winter in his studio in Barra Funda in São Paulo, alongside pieces from his recent show Secret Ceremony at The Approach in London. The works will be exhibited across CAMPLE LINE’s upstairs and downstairs gallery space.
Borba works primarily with found wood that he sources locally, alongside other materials such as cardboard, textile, plaster, and found images from books, magazines, and other photography. These serve as starting points for processes that involve carving, hollowing, scorching, pressing, painting and gluing. His practice is defined by a constant negotiation with his materials, resulting in heavily worked, enigmatic forms that bear richly textured and layered surfaces and feature occasional adornments or embedded objects such as stones or small bronze elements.
Curator Bernardo José de Souza has referred to Borba’s sculptural practice as an ‘imagined cosmology.’ His sculptures are either freestanding or wall-based and combine allusions to European and Brazilian modernist practices with references to self-taught artists of inner Brazil and to ancestral belief systems. De Souza has suggested that Borba’s practice is also informed by the ritual traditions and material culture of Umbanda, a syncretic religion of which his family are followers, which brings together elements of Spiritism with influences from Roman Catholicism and Afro-Brazilian religions like Candomblé.