For Art Week 2023, Galerie Friese unveils the second solo exhibition of Argentinian sculptor Claire de Santa Coloma (b. 1983). The title VOLVER (RETURN), a reference to the iconic tango song by Carlos Gardel, reveals the origins of the exhibition: after more than twenty years abroad, most recently in Lisbon and Sydney, the artist has recently returned to her native Argentina, where she created this first exhibition in her newly set-up studio in Buenos Aires.

Made from found wood or wood that was brought to her, Claire de Santa Coloma’s works interrogate the central themes of sculpture as well as the creative methods that form its foundations. She specifically alludes to the vocabulary of twentieth-century abstract sculpture as a kind of archetype of the genre. Her latest works display a figurativeness that is new for the artist; they are reminiscent of bodies, cult and fetish objects, or suggest—following an inverse logic—a “negative space” for the body. Wandering around the sculptures, set in dialogue by Santa Coloma in situ, evokes a sense of the familiar—a sensual, physical act of remembering that simultaneously connects us to human history and its close relationship with wood as a material.

Anna Leonhardt’s paintings explore color, materiality, and space. By sculpting and layering the paint with a palette knife, the artist creates polychromatic, vividly rendered color fields with strong textures and spatial depth that form the background to floating abstract blocks of color. The gradual transformation of color, shape, space, and light creates a charged relationship between figure and ground.