Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present Interspecific Bodies, the first exhibition of British-French duo Daniel Dewar and Grégory Gicquel in Brazil, bringing together a series of new works, including nine pieces in carved wood, and one sculpture in marble.

For over twenty years Dewar and Gicquel have explored and experimented with craft techniques, materials, and both modern and traditional tools in an ongoing foray into the artist’s and—more generally—humankind's relationship to labour and production. Each new work is created at the hands of the duo themselves after labour-intensive and empirical periods of trial, error, fecund failures, and meaningful surprises. Their repertoire of both arcane and highly technological crafts skills and their knowledge of materials is dizzying, including waterjet-cut stone marquetry, wood-fired ceramics, hand-woven aran wool, sculpted Portuguese marble, and computer assisted embroidery, to name but a few. In addition to their singular approach to materials and processes, Dewar and Gicquel have created a thrilling and complex representational shift, combining their media with a menagerie of incongruous motifs. Whether it’s the surprisingly tautological and brain-itching exercise of hand-modeling standard ceramic washbasins in ceramic; the surrealist rendering of legumes or human entrails in wood coupled with oaken chests; the associative depiction of butterflies in intricate, flitting stitches on textile; or the bold changes in scale that lead to gigantic concrete feet or sweaters, their practice uses these symbols and archetypes both as a motivation—a spark of excitement—and as an augury of their elaborate personal philosophy.

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