Press release
Alice Quaresma: Claiming to Be Finding
Exhibition Dates: November 14 through December 20, 2024
Pablo’s Birthday is pleased to present Claiming to Be Finding, a solo exhibition by Alice Quaresma (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil). Within her practice, Quaresma abandons the assertion of objectivity and shifts the content of images into partially figurative, partially abstract collages. Her engagement with the photographic structure plays with the relationship between depth/flatness and representation/abstraction, using geometry as a simple and universal way to play with objectivity. Quaresma investigates the limits of photography as a medium of truth and precision in relation to the condition of memory.
Looking to the Neo-Concrete movement– a splinter group of the 1950s Brazilian concrete art movement, calling for a greater sensuality, colour and poetic feeling in concrete art– Quaresma deconstructs her images from her archive with paint, pencil, crayon, paper, and other materials in search of a disconnection and fragmentation. Applying shapes or lines of color on top of the images or perhaps adding a second image layer, Quaresma’s approach is spontaneous and non-linear, allowing her to document discoveries and the unknown as she reworks and reinterprets.
In Claiming to Be Finding, Quaresma uses these disruptive elements to visualize feelings of detachment that arise from her experience immigrating from Brazil to London and the US. Claiming to Be Finding was born by observing these feelings– whether prompted by a cultural, emotional, or physical separation. Through this process, geography of the presented landscape is lost, embodying past memories, constantly searching for a sense of belonging. Quaresma revisits each moment, seeking to forge new connections with the photographs from her past, provoking nostalgia, and recalling the emotions, scents, tastes, and feels associated with each moment.
By merging abstraction with personal history, she invites viewers to reflect on their own connections to place and identity, ultimately challenging the notion of photography as a proxy of memory. Through this lens, she underscores the complexities of cultural, emotional, and physical displacement with the ongoing search for connection.
Alice Quaresma (b. 1985, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) received her BFA from Central Saint Martins, and consequently her MFA from Pratt Institute in 2009. Her first institutional solo exhibition was presented at Caixa Cultural São Paulo in 2018 and her most recent exhibitions include Patrick Heide Contemporary (London), Galeria Silvia Cintra + Box4 (Rio de Janeiro), Pablo’s Birthday gallery (New York), and Mana Contemporary (Miami). Quaresma has participated in group shows at the Aperture Foundation, Houston Center for Photography, PS122, Galeria Luisa Strina, and L’Atelier Néerlandais. Quaresma’s career awards include the Photoworks Commission Prize (2021), the Aperture Foundation Summer Open Prize (2019) and Houston Center for Photography Annual Exhibition Prize (2019), Foam Talent Prize (2014), and PS122 Exhibition Prize (2009). Quaresma’s work has been included in publications such as Fisheye magazine, Exit Magazine, Foam Magazine, Extra Fotographie in Context, Edicola, IMA, Serafina, Lens Culture, and Artsy, among others and has collaborated on special projects for Gap, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Hermès, Air France, and Red Bull. She currently lives and works in London.