At Lehmann in Porto, the Paris-based artist Ángela Jiménez Durán presents The Word for World is Poem | A Palavra para Mundo é Poema, her first solo exhibition with the gallery. Born in Madrid in 1996, she brings together painting, sculpture and installation in a show that treats poetry as the ground on which a world can be built.
The title borrows from Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction novel The Word for World is Forest, in which an alien language uses a single word for both “world” and “forest”. Jiménez Durán takes that overlap of ecology and language as a starting point. The exhibition continues her research into the four elements, material transformation and geological fiction, and into the agency of matter, where the line between human and non-human begins to blur.
The curator Filipa da Rocha Nunes reads the show in three acts: “the world presented by loved ones, ancestral beings invited for this moment; the integration of the verb into the linen canvases, like a choreographed aquatic landscape; and the inner world, which erupts from the lower floor and feeds existence with vigour.”
Poems on linen
Jiménez Durán paints with Japanese ash-based ink and acrylic on natural linen. Each canvas is paired with a poem. The largest, The Word for World is Poem, measures 170 by 290 centimetres. Its text closes with the line “to carry the undreamt”.
The Era of Temperature imagines bodies that read the world through warmth and cold rather than sight or hearing, with “oceans like libraries, puddles like poems waiting to be read”. Similarly, in The Archaeologists, figures dive into blind waters and meet their ancestors through touch.
Summoned beings
Meanwhile, tall, pale sculptures stand among the canvases, built from kraft paper, wood, papier mâché, fabric and plaster, finished with wax and paraffin. They include Vesicomyas, Cerith and Valva XI, each raised on slender legs, while Valve XIII hangs on the wall.
The lower floor
Downstairs, A spiral is a spiral is a spiral coils across the floor around a vertical pole. She built the ephemeral installation from clay, water, glue, fabric, wood, metal and thermal blankets. It is the “inner world” of the curator’s third act.
Jiménez Durán lives in Paris and works at POUSH in Aubervilliers. She studied at the École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy, completing her MA in 2019, and in 2025 received the Call to Dream grant from the Sam Francis Foundation at 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles.
Lehmann opened in November 2017 in Porto’s Bonfim neighbourhood, 200 metres from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto, with a main exhibition area and a project space across two levels. The exhibition runs until 7 November 2026.
Artist: Ángela Jiménez Durán / @angela.jimenezduran
Photography: Dinis Santos
Location: Lehmann / @lehmann_contemporary, Porto, Portugal
