Alexandre da Cunha valuation
Turns mops, broom heads, sun umbrellas and concrete mixer drums into sculpture with the lightest possible touch.
Alexandre da Cunha was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and studied at FAAP in São Paulo, at the Royal College of Art in London and at Chelsea College of Art, where he took an MA in 2000.
What a work by Alexandre da Cunha is worth
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation is free, made online from the photographs you send, and it commits you to nothing. We act for sellers across the United Kingdom, Europe and the United States.
Write to info@whitebankfineart.co.uk, or start below.
Bio
Alexandre da Cunha was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1969 and studied at FAAP in São Paulo, at the Royal College of Art in London and at Chelsea College of Art, where he took an MA in 2000. He lives and works between London and São Paulo. His practice rests on the ready-made: everyday, mass-produced objects — mops, broom heads, sun umbrellas, concrete mixer drums — chosen, combined and altered just enough to read as sculpture, a method his gallery describes as pointing rather than making. The work plays the cheap and the worn against the language of modernist sculpture and painting, and the labour the objects already carry against the artist's own. His exhibitions include Homebodies at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in 2015 and Duologue, with Phillip King, at the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2018.
His sculptures are unique or made in small series, and because the materials are ordinary and often already worn, the line between patina and damage needs care: any change since the work left the studio should be recorded, and the components of an assembled piece must be complete. Wall works come up alongside the sculpture. Thomas Dane Gallery, Luisa Strina in São Paulo and James Cohan in New York have shown him, and a provenance through one of them is the usual starting point.
Rio, Chelsea and Full Catastrophe
Full Catastrophe, first shown at Thomas Dane Gallery in London in 2012, is a numbered series of concrete mixer drums detached from their machines and set on plinths like archaeological finds, some filled with concrete or polished at the rim. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago owns Full Catastrophe (drum XIII).
His work is in Tate, the ICA in Boston, the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Inhotim.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
