And Your Flesh Becomes a Poem - solo exhibition

Underdogs Gallery 2025

Lisbon, January 2025 – Underdogs opens 2025 in the best possible way with a new solo exhibition by artist Tamara Alves. Opening on 24 January, this is the artist's first solo show at this gallery since 2020, and features 27 works, combining drawing, watercolour, resin and wood. As for the themes that run through the creations, they are mainly instinctive vitality, love and the wild forces that mould the human experience.

Recognised for her raw and poetic exploration of primal instincts and untamed emotions, Tamara Alves has built an engaging narrative that celebrates the visceral connections between humans, animals and the natural world. This solo exhibition follows on from one held in 2000 at Underdogs. ‘Over the last five years,’ explains Tamara Alves, ‘I've been interested in the message of absence, of silence. The invisible, the seduction of the
unspoken’. That's why, for example, there are drawings that have emerged from a stain, along with resin portraits or torn watercolours, which don't give the whole narrative.

In the new exhibition ‘And Your Flesh Becomes a Poem’, the duality of the human condition remains one of the artist's key themes, along with the night as a setting, instincts and introspection, in which we are confronted with what is most intimate and true in us. The female figure continues to be a ‘central focus’ in the artist's work.

The female figure continues to be the ‘central focus’ of the artist's work, and she also believes that in this show there is a ‘greater deconstruction of the figure and a greater emphasis on the word’. An example of this is the title of the exhibition, which borrows from the poem by American writer Walt Whitman. The lack of control, visible in the works that use ‘torn paper, almost as if it were skin’, was introduced to contrast with her personal restraint, explains Tamara Alves.

The artist builds fragments that evoke absence, silence and tension. Between overlappingvshadows and torn lines, she guides us through a universe where light and darkness coexist, revealing a confrontation with mortality that paradoxically celebrates life. Inspired by mythologies and still lifes, his work invites us to pause for reflection and to encounter the ‘obscure’ that lives within each of us.
Alongside the exhibition, which will run until 8 March, there will also be a limited edition of Underdogs, to be launched on the Wednesday before the exhibition, 22 January. At the opening, on Friday 24 January, everyone who wants to see the new works by Tamara Alves will also be able to admire the mural that she has painted on the back of the gallery in Marvila. ‘The Wolf Awaits’, inspired by a phrase by Abbas Kiarostami, invites contemplation and reflection on our own essence, and enriches this urban space in the capital.

©Bruno Lopes
©Chris Costa

TAMARA ALVES

I was born when the plants are born