Leda Catunda: I like to like what others are liking

Drawing from a world of visual and material excess, Brazilian artist Leda Catunda offers a vivid reflection on the sensory saturation of modern-day life. A citation from the artist’s own words, the exhibition title—I like to like what others are liking—reads as a contemporary confession that captures the complex entanglements of taste, desire and identity.

Marking the artist’s largest monographic presentation outside of Brazil to date, the exhibition brings together a diverse body of work spanning from the 1980s to the present. From large-scale installations to elemental watercolours, each piece embodies a sensuous negotiation between the handmade and the mass-produced, offering a whimsical critique of pop culture and consumerism.
    
Catunda played a vital role in the 1980s, reshaping Brazil’s art scene and blurring the lines between painting and sculpture. With a distinctly process-driven approach, her early works featured pattern-like compositions reminiscent of sewing templates, which she assembled from domestic fabrics, readymade graphics and products of mass culture. By the 1990s, her practice shifted towards abstraction, replacing printed figuration with organic, bulging forms. In recent years, her work has taken on a baroque intensity—pleated drapes, protuberances, lush ornamentation and proliferating flaps—inviting us to consider the limits and mechanisms of aesthetics.

Spanning over four decades, Catunda’s practice continues to exude urgency and wit, offering not only a critique of pop culture consumption but also a tender, poetic reclamation of the everyday. As the exhibition unfolds, the works from different periods invite us to consider how visual pleasure, personal memory and mass imagery coexist messily, playfully and viscerally.

Leda Catunda: I like to like what others are liking is curated by Hoor Al Qasimi, Director and President of Sharjah Art Foundation, with Meera Madhu, Curatorial Assistant at the Foundation. Co-organised with Halle für Kunst Steiermark, Graz, the exhibition will travel to Austria in June 2026.