'SWAB - Barcelona, 2025'

'Eternal Ripples'

with works by Leilei Wu, Ugo Sébastiaõ & Stanislav Zábrodský

For our second participation in SWAB, we have decided to continue the exploration of potential spatio-temporal rifts initiated last year with 'Morrow(s)'.

Through a mirrored lens, three artists are once again exhibiting their work for the first time in Barcelona.

The works of Leilei Wu (China - 1997), Ugo Sebastião (France - 1998), and Stanislav Zábrodský (Czech Republic - 1996) align with a circular conception of time, a theme dear to the writer Jorge Luis Borges.

Hybrid, both in what they convey and in their artistic forms, they aim to freeze elements in a certain contemporaneity that initially suggest vestiges of a distant era.
Past and future collide, evaporate, leaving space only for an infinite and multiple present.

It is from this anachronistic tension line that Leilei Wu's sculpture 'THS05' emerges. Is it a mutant organic form from another planet or the remains of an animal extinct for centuries? The Milan-based artist cultivates ambiguity, infusing a mysterious vitality into this amphibian form.

Stanislav Zábrodský approaches the subject of circular time through the prism of materiality. The composite materials that populate his works can be perceived as past reminiscences, while the fossilized forms that come alive - animated yet destined to be uncovered in a hypothetical future– evoke contemporary questions.

Ugo Sebastião's paintings, drawing from the iconography of Baroque, confront the dictates of 21st-century imagery. The depicted subjects are adorned with current codes and ultimately resemble samples, capable of being looped.
The result is a truly contemporary devotion, a mystical transfiguration linked to the digital.