Home with a Man

Through shared themes of material transformation, narrative tension, and the reordering of the everyday, Home with a Man invites viewers into a layered dialogue between the two artists. Together, they explore domesticity and scripted roles through sculpture, installation, and painting. The exhibition title, borrowed from da Cunha’s Exile series (2022–2025), could be read like a line from a diary or a cheap romance novel, direct yet ambiguous and emotionally charged. Home with a Man builds through staged gestures and altered objects – where the domestic life operates as both routine and fantasy, and the ordinary slips into something less certain.  

Alexandre da Cunha reconfigures the everyday with poetic vision and sculptural precision. He describes his practice as one of pointing rather than making—a gesture of recognition and reframing. In his hands, ordinary materials are not just elevated but recontextualised: stripped from their usual roles and given new, often unexpected meanings. Mop heads become tapestries, concrete reveals a fragile delicacy, and deck chairs morph into visual puzzles—each transformation a subversion. 

Grounded in materiality and driven by concept, da Cunha’s work brings together found objects—often sourced from domestic, industrial, or leisure settings—to create tensions and conversations that speak both to his native Brazil’s improvisational vernacular and to the tropes of international modernism.

In Home with a Man, da Cunha presents works crafted from materials that frequently appear in his practice—scrap metal, mop heads, coconut tree branches, and discarded functional objects. These materials are not disguised; their original purposes remain visible, yet they are transformed and reimagined as artworks, artefacts, or subtle provocations. Alongside his better-known sculptural pieces, the exhibition features a selection of intimate gouache on paper works from his Exile series (2022–2025). Created between London and São Paulo during a period of personal transition, these small, portable pieces act as diaristic fragments—visual letters painted in pigment that map the emotional and spatial experience of moving between places. 

Brian Griffiths is a sculptor who transforms everyday materials and outdated objects into fictional, often absurd worlds. He uses dumb objects as a way to imaginatively travel: “I make art to pretend to be other, in hope to be elsewhere.”  This is an approach to making as a means of escape – one that embraces pretence, disguises, players, genres, and artifice. 

As much an exhibition-maker as a sculptor, Griffiths seeks to gather and connect things – setting up fictional cues for associative thinking and the messiness of feeling. His work favours awkwardness over elegance, and sincerity over perfection. It offers an alternative to monumentality – one based not on permanence or authority, but on the honesty and peculiarity of human experience.

In Home with a Man, Griffiths continues his No No to Knock-Knocks series (2018–), which centres on a puppet-like wooden figure all weathered, exposed, and seemingly not quite fit for purpose. Part tragic hero, part broken toy, the little man clunks his way through seemingly purposeless tasks. Here, he repeatedly appears, posing in leatherette portable landscapes of executive briefcases. Griffiths also presents new sculptures that dress the exhibition as a staged and provisional event. Nesting suitcases unfold to reveal a sequence of scaled dramas; and hammers hang out not only as elegant forms but as pragmatic weights and loaded metaphors. 

This exhibition is curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes. 

Alexandre da Cunha and Brian Griffiths: Home with a Man will run from 15th August – 28th September 2025, at Elizabeth Xi Bauer’s Exmouth Market location. We are pleased to announce that Elizabeth Xi Bauer’s Exmouth Market gallery has extended opening hours, open Wednesday to Sunday, from 12-6 pm, extended to 8 pm on Thursdays. A Private View will be held on 14th August 2025, 6 – 8 pm.