Madragoa opened the September season with two individual exhibitions. Kate Newby and Anna Schachinger occupy two exhibition spaces in the gallery: Loved like a sunbeam (Kate Newby, New Zealand, 1979) and Desta maneira não (Anna Schachinger, Austria, 1990) are the first solo exhibitions of the artists at the Madragoa gallery.

Kate Newby’s sculptural pieces hang mostly from the ceiling, like small memorial archipelagos. Each piece is the result of a need, and even the impulse to gather records, materials and fragments, which transform, as manufactured fossils, testimonies of a past lived in a certain place and time. The collection of fragments is followed by their reformulation and recharacterization. Each element collected in a place – whether it’s glass, earth, clay or others – is remodelled until it reaches the thickness and concavity clustered in the suspended wires. The memory of a space-time is reactivated by the transformed object, a testimony of an immaterial moment, which matches an experience associated with the place where the collection, transformation and baking of the pieces took place. These scenarios of cataloguing the real are displayed in the space, generating a phased, open and closed path due to the physical proximity of the pieces. While Alluding, at the same time, to their own distance from the moment of discovery, transformation and materialization. The testimonial compositions are gathered here for the first time, the fruit of travels between 2016 and 2019, in New York, Marfa, Portland, Lyon and Toronto.

In contrast to the suspended personal memory, devices for wonderment (2019) is on the floor and highlights the fiction of a natural event: a stormy wave that caused the misaligned composition of the elements in the exhibition space. The details of each composite in the works, such as the grooves caused by the medicine wrappings and the specific textures, provoke a greater closeness to each piece, a vision that becomes intimate thanks to the object-experience context.

Desta maneira não by Anna Schachinger is exhibited in the space Encima and comprises new paintings by the artist created in 2019. In two rooms, the works flood the space with multiple overlaps, transparencies that provide solidity to the image through its liveliness. A constant complement between the sharpness of the environment and the stale presence of human figures. This series, marked by distortion and reflection, was made in the artist’s studio overlooking Lake Millstatt and incorporates the presence of water, with hues and undulations.

The shades and forms appear through the water film and the fragmentation that such imposes on the eye. It contaminates two worlds: the surface, the human figure and what belongs to the depths, the fauna and flora in sharpness and fiction. It’s like forcing the eyes on dry land to see the world underwater. First, there’s apparent chaos. Then, the habituation and the subsequent revival with explosive colors, like the red details in I want to get to know you (2019).

The exhibitions are open until 9 November at Madragoa, Lisbon.