Brazilian duo opens “Leva tempo, mas vai dar tempo” on March 7 at Casa Seva, featuring 20 new works and a live-built performative wax installation. Free admission.
A São Paulo debut
Irmãs Gelli, the Rio de Janeiro-based duo formed by sisters Alice and Gabi Gelli, are presenting their first solo exhibition in São Paulo. The show “Leva tempo, mas vai dar tempo” (It Takes Time, But Time Will Come) opens on Saturday, March 7, 2026, at Casa Seva, an independent exhibition space dedicated to art and sustainability inside the Vila Modernista complex in the Jardins neighborhood. Admission is free, and the show runs through April 18, 2026.
Curated by Catalina Bergues, also a curator at Instituto Tomie Ohtake, the exhibition brings together approximately 20 new works, including large-scale pieces, kinetic works, and a performative installation that lends the show its name. The entire project was conceived and produced throughout 2025, marking a milestone in the duo’s five-year joint artistic practice.
Time as raw material
The exhibition title carries a double meaning: the slow, layered process of working with vegetable wax, and an open invitation for visitors to slow down and inhabit the experience. Curator Catalina Bergues articulates the concept precisely.
Time does not appear here as a theme, but as part of the very material itself. The accumulations, the successive dips, and the waiting involved in working with wax make visible layers of time deposited in a processual way. By inviting the public to observe and interact with these traces, the artists displace the idea of a finished work fixed in time: on the contrary, these are works that continue to transform in the presence of visitors and through the artists’ own continuous action. Catalina Bergues, curator
Works in vegetable wax are built through successive dips into liquid material — a procedure requiring patience, repetition, and attentiveness to the rhythms of the material itself. The results are large-scale translucent pieces that evoke depth, suspension, and continuous transformation, in direct dialogue with references drawn from the natural world.
Half a ton of wax, built live
The centerpiece of the show is a performative installation weighing roughly half a ton of wax, inspired by the formation of stalactites and stalagmites — rock structures that take thousands of years to form inside caves. Like those natural phenomena, the work will be built up in layers throughout the entire exhibition period, in open sessions where the public is invited to watch its transformation in real time.
Conceived at a monumental scale, the installation requires visitors to walk around it, reinforcing the physical and experiential dimension that defines the sisters’ practice. First-time kinetic works — in which parts shift horizontally — are also on view, deepening the dialogue between time, matter, and spatial perception.
We’ve been taught since childhood to keep our hands behind our backs in art exhibitions. That alone creates a physical distance. But when you invite people to touch the material, to step inside an installation, to build collectively, it activates every sense. You leave calmer than you arrived. You can feel the impact of the work in your own body. Alice Gelli
Sustainability as method
Sustainability is a structural axis of the duo’s practice and shapes the materials used throughout: Ecomix vegetable wax (lower paraffin content), recycled plastic from car headlights — developed in partnership with the Arte 8 Reciclagem project — and reclaimed wood. All materials are recyclable, reusable, and continuously reworked in the studio.
Over the years our work has grown in scale, and thinking about large-format pieces with sustainable materials makes much more sense — like when we created a seven-meter-long work made from 45 kg of recycled plastic, the equivalent of the average monthly plastic consumption of 45 people. That plastic stops being trash and becomes art. Gabi Gelli
About Irmãs Gelli
Alice and Gabi Gelli are sisters, artists, and natives of Rio de Janeiro. Their research focuses on encounter, exchange, and the materiality of time in the face of an increasingly virtual world. Together, they have held solo exhibitions at the Centro Cultural dos Correios (Rio de Janeiro, 2024), Galeria Brisa (Lisbon, 2024), and Lurixs (Rio de Janeiro, 2023). They participated in group shows in Brazil and abroad, including “Trame di memoria” at Milan Design Week 2025, and were selected for the VII Bienal do Sertão in Minas Gerais in 2025. In 2022, they created original works for the Jaguar Parade in São Paulo and New York.
About Casa Seva
Designed by architect Flavio de Carvalho and built between 1936 and 1938 inside the Vila Modernista, Casa Seva is an exhibition space dedicated to sustainability, art, and culture. Through exhibitions, events, talks, and workshops, it fosters a more sustainable network among artists, gallerists, and visitors.
Visitor Information
Exhibition “Leva tempo, mas vai dar tempo” — Irmãs Gelli
Curator: Catalina Bergues
Dates: March 7 – April 18, 2026
Hours: Tuesday–Friday, 11am–6pm; Saturdays, 11am–3pm
Address: Casa Seva — Alameda Lorena, 1257, Casa 1 — Vila Modernista — São Paulo, SP, Brazil
Free admission. More information at www.casaseva.com.br and www.irmasgelli.com.br
Photo: Divulgação
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