Leda Catunda exhbition: Favorita

Emanuela Campoli is pleased to announce Favorita, Leda Catunda’s first solo exhibition in Paris and with the gallery. The artist is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Sharjah Art Foundation titled I like to like what others are liking, running through the 8th February 2026. Building on her longstanding research on consumerism and mass-produced imagery since the 1980s, Catunda’s recent work intensifies the accumulation and layering of textile and visual elements, mirroring the current landscape of visual saturation and accelerated consumption.

Leda Catunda emerged within the Brazilian art scene during one of the recurrent historical moments marked by the so-called “return of painting”. Catunda was part of the pivotal exhibition Como Vai Você?, Geração 80 at Parque Lage Visual Art School in Rio de Janeiro in 1984, which was far from being merely derivative of an international trend but an actual reinvention of painting. As a former student of Armando Álvarez Penteado Foundation in São Paulo, she has been influenced by the teachings of historians and artists who addressed the art institution from a critical standpoint. Yet, in the post-dictatorship context, she also embraced a form of joyful resistance through play and material experimentation. Catunda has since pushed the limits of what painting can be, both materially and critically. Working with soft, tactile materials, her hybrid paintings-objects combine textiles, synthetic fabrics, and foam through techniques like collage, sewing, and extensive layering. Her works often integrate popular images and fabrics as ready-mades, reflecting a gaze that is both critical and empathetic toward the desires shaped by consumer culture.

In Favorita, Catunda engages with personal taste as a performative and affective category. The work of the same name, installed on the ground floor, features a series of clustered motifs, including geometric shapes and real apparel charged with emotional investment - a row of skirts, teamwear, bags and of course, jeans. The latter’s brand, cut, wash, and even how they are worn can relate to a particular tribe, while their signs of wear can become emotional traces, imprinted with the body’s shape and sometimes associated with particular memories. Catunda acknowledges the standardization of desires but resists cynical readings of popular taste as mere alienation; she approaches it instead as a sincere and heart-felt search for identity. In the work, the motif in the top right is not circumstantial - the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo logo, designed by Aloisio Magalhães in 1965, is a way of addressing the art institution existing in the middle of a field of visual exuberance.

In her topographical paintings, a series of personal geographies integrate the exuberance of both the natural and the artificial. Caminho com saias (Path with skirts), 2025 is a composition of mainly pleated drapes (echoing the skirt as a marker of feminity) but also prominent protuberances and her signature unfolding flaps. Her use of gold edges and trails echoes the colonial fantasy of El Dorado - a golden land invented by European imagination, which justified extraction and conquest in the Americas. In her other, significantly smaller padded landscapes, such as Bomba (2024) and Paisagem com Garota (2025) Catunda pushes further the relationship between landscape imagery and geometry, given sometimes by the preexisting pattern of found fabrics. Catunda’s sewn compositions engage equally with both the iconographic value of the images themselves and the textures, folds, and physicality of her carefully chosen materials.

Catunda’s recent solo exhibitions include: I like to like what others are liking, Sharjah Art Foundation (2025-26); Leda Catunda: EUFORIA, ICA Milano, Milan, Italy (2023); Leda Catunda & Alejandra Seeber, MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires (2021); Projeto Parede | Paisagem moderna, MAM – Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil (2019); I Love You Baby, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brasil (2016). She has also participated in the group shows Rituales del Cotidiano, Collegium, Arévalo, Spain (2024); Fullgás – Artes visuais e anos 1980 no Brasil, CCBB – Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brasil (2024); PLAY, FITE Biennale Textile, Clermont-Ferrand, France (2024); El Dorado, Fundación Proa, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Americas Society, New York, USA (2023).