L’SPACE Gallery is pleased to present Where Time Stands Still, a solo exhibition by internationally acclaimed Argentine artist Nicola Costantino. A leading figure in contemporary Latin American art, Costantino is known for her provocative and multidisciplinary practice, which has challenged conventional ideas of beauty, identity, desire, and the human body for more than three decades. She represented Argentina at the 2013 Venice Biennale, and her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.
In this new chapter of her practice, Costantino turns toward beauty itself as a form of provocation. Far from being merely decorative or reassuring, beauty can be unsettling, disturbing, and even threatening. Through flowers and botanical forms, the artist continues her longstanding exploration of mortality, desire, and the boundaries between the human and natural worlds.
Drawing on Pardes, Costantino’s ongoing botanical project, whose name comes from the Hebrew word for orchard or garden and is historically connected to the word “paradise” the exhibition transforms the gallery into an imagined garden where flowers defy gravity, human and animal identities merge, and time appears momentarily suspended.
The exhibition brings together ceramic sculptures, botanical installations, tapestries, and hybrid figures inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. These works connect Costantino’s longstanding exploration of the body and animality with her fascination with the natural world. Working with traditional ceramic techniques, including Japanese Nerikomi, she creates intricate botanical forms that blur the boundaries between craftsmanship, sculpture, and nature.
Suspended clusters of ceramic flowers appear to float in space, suggesting a world in which time has momentarily stopped. Their permanence challenges the natural cycle of blooming and decay, invoking the centuries-old tradition of memento mori, the reminder that beauty, even at its height, carries the inevitability of its disappearance.
Throughout Where Time Stands Still, Costantino explores the tension between permanence and impermanence, pleasure and consumption, beauty and mortality. Her garden offers a space in which familiar distinctions begin to dissolve, inviting viewers to reconsider their relationship with the living world.
As the artist writes: “The garden does not eliminate time. It holds it for a moment. And we enter it.”
L'SPACE