Home with a Man reunites Alexandre da Cunha and Brian Griffiths at Elizabeth Xi Bauer

Bowie Sharp

Brian Griffiths, Head-back, Chin-up (No No to Knock-Knocks), 2023. Wood, plywood, metal, cardboard, paint, tools, fixtures and fittings. Size variable. Images Courtesy of Des Bains. Courtesy of the Artist. © Brian Griffiths.

“The reason I stopped painting years ago is because I wanted to make objects with a relationship to the social world. I didn’t want to make art about art - I wanted to make art about being alive and feeling alive,” says Brian Griffiths. That desire to reframe the familiar, and shift it into a different register, pulses through Home with a Man, which opened on 15 August at Elizabeth Xi Bauer. Curated by Maria do Carmo M. P. de Pontes, the exhibition reunites Griffiths and Alexandre da Cunha, who first exhibited together in São Paulo over two decades ago.

The title comes from one of da Cunha’s paintings in his ongoing Exile series (2022–), small A4 works that are both portable and diaristic. “Creating these works felt to me a bit like writing notes in a diary,” he explains. These modest paintings, unlike his monumental sculptures, travel easily, reflecting his life split between London and São Paulo. In the exhibition, this sense of portability and personal narrative connects with Griffiths’ sculptural interventions.

Griffiths’ This is Not an Exit (2025) consists of three leatherette sofas and armchairs in pastel pink, white, and blue. Each piece of furniture rests atop a skirted plinth, or trestle, and holds an open briefcase containing a pink puppet and assorted office detritus. “This figure claims centre ground, even though it seems vulnerable or deflated. It still performs for us. For me, that’s a very interesting set of tensions. I see them as domestic monuments, or perhaps fantasy maquettes for monuments - which is slightly ridiculous,” Griffiths explains. “The pink figure is based on a famous British puppet… puppets are a very efficient way of telling stories.” On choosing a puppet over a doll, he says: “I chose a puppet because I don’t want things to be fixed. I want them to feel contingent, slipping, provisional. Things change. The idea is that this world I’ve created has been built from that figure - the figure tells me what to do.”

Da Cunha’s sculptures are equally concerned with transformation. He fuses incongruous materials: leather with nail files (Copacabana, 2023), oven trays with helmets (Batalha, 2022), coconut shells wrapped in yellow tights (Perpetua, 2023). He uses materials sourced from the worn and discarded, with surfaces that speak of previous use. In Acqua II (2016), he drapes fabric, concealing and partially revealing in an almost sensual way. Organic materials recur in his practice, chosen for their capacity to change over time.

Griffiths’ works also play with concealment and revelation. In & Other Business (Left Side) (2025), an oversized hand emerges from a suitcase wrapped in bright, knotted fabric and crowned with a pompom, reminiscent of a magician’s trick paused mid-performance. The suitcase motif runs throughout his contributions: in Good Boy Ben (2025), a vintage wooden dog sits guard over a locked case.

Sixteen gouache works from Da Cunha’s Exile punctuate the gallery walls, ranging from pure abstraction to the rare figuration of Exile (Catwalk) (2025). The curatorial arrangement heightens the friction and affinities between their two practices. Griffiths’ objects, which are staged with a certain level of deliberate artifice and theatricality, are imbued with humour, and something verging on melancholy; da Cunha’s works, with their intriguing selection of materials and abstraction, invite slow looking. The show’s strength lies in the way each artist’s language unsettles the other’s. Da Cunha sees the contrast between their practices as a strength, remarking that while they use similar domestic and found materials, “My work doesn’t always fit into his world, and that’s what I like… it’s almost like we’re two poets using the same words but expressing very different things.”

Da Cunha likens the process of exhibiting pieces in the context of the gallery, and alongside the works by Griffiths, to “knowing a person you’ve lived with for years and suddenly realising something about them you’d never noticed before.” Griffiths, for his part, insists on the instability of his objects: “I don’t want things to be fixed. I want them to feel contingent, slipping, provisional.” It’s this openness that energises the exhibition. Rather than offering a final statement, the pieces in the show feel provisional. Their meanings shift depending on how and where they are seen, and who they are seen by.

Elizabeth Xi Bauer, Exmouth Market, London. 15 August - 28 September 2025. Wednesday–Sunday, 12–6 pm (Thursdays until 8 pm).