Following her duo-show exhibition, Fuente Perversa with Diego Gualandris in 2021 and her late-2024 performance SHHHHH with Guadaloupe Lobos, N.A.S.A.L. is delighted to present Aileen Gavonel’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, El Cuarto de las Caracolas.
Aileen Gavonel (1989, Lima, Peru) is a multidisciplinary Peruvian artist whose practice weaves ceramics, performance, visual poetry, and collaborative making. With a background in printmaking from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, her transition into ceramics emerged from a self-taught journey rooted in working with Peruvian ceramists across rural and urban territories. Her work explores themes such as human fragility, emotional repair, and the tension between science and spirituality through crafted forms and material symbolism.
"Aileen Gavonel's work is always a dialogue with time. It's as if she creates to graze the edges of different intertwined worlds. Aileen shapes sand and earth with her hands, transforming them into objects imbued with multiple sensations. From the beginning, ceramics became her closest companion: their diverse uses and meanings - midway between decorative ornament, utilitarian object, artistic expression, and ritual - have always been her gravitational center. At this intersection, Aileen builds installations where the everyday coexists with what transcends the earthly.
Her new exhibition, El Cuarto de los Caracolas, takes as its starting point flashes of childhood memories from the shores of the Pacific Ocean. Playing between the sea and the hills, she would climb dunes to gaze at the blue vastness and imagine how everything was once ocean. To envision a planet radically different from today's reality emerged as both fantasy and warning: the possibility that the sea might reclaim everything through a great flood or deluge. This idea, simultaneously apocalyptic and foundational, appears persistently throughout the exhibition, through maps drawn with pigment and sand, sculptures of marine mollusks, and embroidered textiles that serve as waypoints. (...) "
Exhibition Text by Miguel A. Lopez
