Ruins: Fernando Casasempere

Fred Levine is excited to announce its upcoming exhibition Ruins a solo exhibition with London based, Chilean artist, Fernando Casasempere, opening on Saturday 15th November. The exhibition brings together new ceramic sculptures and paintings that continue Casasempere’s long-standing exploration of time, decay, and humanity’s imprint on the natural and built environment in particular Ruins and their architectural fragments.

In Ruins, Casasempere examines the architectural fragment as both a physical and psychological relic, a trace of what once was and a catalyst for imagination. His sculptural works evoke remnants of ancient structures, using a technique that builds his sculpture from blocks or bricks that reference the continuity of human construction and the erosion of civilization over time. Alongside these, a series of Salares paintings investigates the marks, or scars that nature leaves through its own processes of transformation and regeneration.

Casasempere describes his enduring fascination with ruins as something that exists “in my own collective unconscious.” From early encounters with the monumental cities and temples of his youth, it was not the perfection of architecture that endured in his memory, but the incompleteness of what remained and abandoned fragments are what inspire him to reconstruct personal histories of place and time.

Through this exhibition, Casasempere brings these impressions into physical form, working within ceramics’ full expressive potential, from raw material to refined structure, from permanence to fragility. His practice invites reflection on what persists and what fades, and how human and natural forces intertwine to shape the landscapes we inhabit.