Gokula Stoffel: Spell

Opening Reception:
Friday, May 29, 6 — 8 PM

François Ghebaly is proud to present Gokula Stoffel’s exhibition Spell, the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles.

The exhibition’s title, Spell, holds within it the possibility of fascination: to be under a spell is to be in thrall to something outside of oneself. For Stoffel, fascination becomes a working method, as she crafts her cross-disciplinary works intuitively, responding to the immediate, sensuous qualities of her materials. The act of artmaking becomes a way for Stoffel to access an altered consciousness, one which is both more present and more open. The idea of alternative forms of consciousness returns as subject matter in the works on view in Spell. The spectral figures that emerge out of Stoffel’s layered compositions engage in music, ritual, and solitary epiphany. At times, these figures merge with the natural environment, demonstrating the porous boundary between our individual selves and a wider, shared world. 

This porousness extends to Stoffel’s approach to her materials. Her hybrid works decentralize notions of medium, blurring distinctions between painting, sculpture, and craft. Stoffel’s tactile, relief-like works emphasize their own objecthood, expanding traditional imagic or sculptural registers and insisting on their own unique materiality. Each work becomes the record of a dialogue between the artist, her materials, and a shared world of sensation. 

Gokula Stoffel’s (b. 1988, Porto Alegre, Brazil) artworks emerge from a dialogue with her environment and materials that centers ideas of sentiments, memory, subconscious, and exchange through the creative act. Her brightly colored compositions, which combine painting, found materials, cold porcelain sculpture, textiles, and woven fiber, are executed freely and intuitively in a flexible approach to art-making that embraces spontaneity, and that allows latent forms and unplanned images to surface in careful layers of figurative and abstract gesture. 

Stoffel lives and works in São Paulo. Select solo and group exhibitions include Pivô, São Paulo, Brazil; Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil; Elizabeth Xi Bauer, London, UK; Andrew Kreps, New York, US; Hirosaki Museum of Contemporary Art, Hirosaki, Japan; Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, Brazil; and Mendes Wood DM, Brussels, Belgium.