Second Homes

from September to November 2014

Rita Sobral Campos

Born in Portugal in 1982. Lives and works in New York.

A graduate of the New York School of Visual Art; represented by the Galerie Andreas Huber in Vienna.

Whether they are scripts, scenarios, sculptures, or videos, the works of Rita Sobral Campos are first and foremostly based on writing and on a narrative framework.

Borrowing from all kinds of worlds and above all inspired by her reading (science fiction, fantasy, mythology, press articles, scientific essays, historical epics etc.), her fictions are built up from historical and philosophical backgrounds.

Based on these contexts, the artist creates imaginary worlds governed by rules, systems of thought, or autonomous beliefs. Anything is possible: madness may overrun people’s minds and build its own kingdom, as in the work entitled For the Madman the Neighbour is Himself; personified heresies are capable of convincing a creature in search of truth, as in the project Frédérik… Each fiction provides the chance to broach political, philosophical, or sociological questions, and the resulting plastic work applies to various media, depending on which parts of the scenario require emphasis for the artist.

Rita Sobral’s world is an obsessional research project, a complex and multimedia aesthetic system with an abstract and mysterious visual vocabulary that evokes and occasionally repeats the forms of the maze, the schematisation of the worldwide web, or other symbols with geometric forms that remain to be deciphered.