GOING OUT FOR DINNER?
Dinner at Penalva da Graca
WANT TO GO FOR A SWIM?
A busy day during the high season.
WE LOVE RIDING THE TRAM 28
Lisbon's popular Tram 28 is only 3 minutes from Tins Lisbon. Here is all you need to know.
Thrown into the World
Thrown Into the World
Eli Benveniste is fascinated by the past. The more ancient the better. Cave drawings, fossils, and bone structures of long-lost animals – in fact everything that has taken place long before homo sapiens settled as farmers, ignited her interest.
I have always been moved by fossils, they emerge to our surface from thousands of years ago, bearing witness to the last moments of a living being. The position in which they land, in the midst of a final movement, is very beautiful in a pure and scientific way.
Thrown Into the World: The Opening
Eli Benveniste has worked with rubber for many years. In 2010 she showed the first series of works in rubber called Performance in Clay. Ego, a retrospective exhibit at Galerie Asbaek, came the year after in 2011, and two years later Shadow of Clouds, an exhibition at Galerie Birch in 2013. On all three occasions the reliefs in rubber were modelled with her own body in the raw clay, then cast in rubber and mounted on canvas.
A decade later, at the Brancacci Art Gallery in Florence, the series of Fossils in rubber was a continuation of the former, but now she also used her own sculptures as a tool, which changed the expression of the rubber reliefs completely.
Perhaps it was due to the major changes in her personal life that caused her work to alter drastically, which can be seen in her latest works. They are significantly different.
Thrown into the world 2024-25, is a new series of ceramic reliefs and sculptures. The works appears “untouched”, except for the decisive gesture of the hand that created them.
Each relief is modelled on nature’s terms, so to speak, letting the material come into its own right.
For the exhibition at Tings Art in Lisbon, a selection of these “untouched” reliefs has been chosen to be cast in silicone rubber, which has a completely different texture and almost anonymous feeling to it – at the limit of artistic qualification. Soft as a baby doll, yet robust, the impression in rubber is very precise. The contrast to clay is so extreme – what could be more different from man’s first material, to man’s last…. Rubber, if not exactly noble, has, on the other hand, a strong contemporary identity to it. The irony is obvious – man’s ingenuity drives us forward and backward at the same time.
Bruno Corà, Art historian and art critic.
A decade later, at the Brancacci Art Gallery in Florence, the series of Fossils in rubber was a continuation of the former, but now she also used her own sculptures as a tool, which changed the expression of the rubber reliefs completely.
Perhaps it was due to the major changes in her personal life that caused her work to alter drastically, which can be seen in her latest works. They are significantly different.
Thrown into the world 2024-25, is a new series of ceramic reliefs and sculptures. The works appears “untouched”, except for the decisive gesture of the hand that created them.
Each relief is modelled on nature’s terms, so to speak, letting the material come into its own right.
For the exhibition at Tings Art in Lisbon, a selection of these “untouched” reliefs has been chosen to be cast in silicone rubber, which has a completely different texture and almost anonymous feeling to it – at the limit of artistic qualification. Soft as a baby doll, yet robust, the impression in rubber is very precise. The contrast to clay is so extreme – what could be more different from man’s first material, to man’s last…. Rubber, if not exactly noble, has, on the other hand, a strong contemporary identity to it. The irony is obvious – man’s ingenuity drives us forward and backward at the same time.
Bruno Corà, Art historian and art critic.
