Silvina Leibenberg was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, on March 1st, 1966. She studied at the Faculty of Architecture and at the National School of Fine Arts Institute of the University of the Republic and has specialized, among other institutions, at the Columbia University, London College of Fashion and Harvard University. She embraced and resumed her passion for the visual arts, first as a student at the Collell and then at Marivi Ugolino workshop and, currently under the direction of Josefina Pezzino.
But her first exhibition would not be until 2019, the year in which she participated in a collective exhibition precisely at the Casa Collell Museum, within the event “Museums at Night”. Leibenberg always works in tune with the four elements. Understanding the earth as clay, water as the indispensable complement that shapes her works, air also essential for drying the pieces, and fire whose essence transforms clay into ceramic; in an exercise as necessary as the one raised by Luis Alberto Spinetta in his song “Barro perhaps” (“If I don’t sing what I feel, I’m going to die inside ... I have to shout at the winds until I burst, even time in my place“).
The works gathered here represent caves, pieces worked, sedimented or intervened by the wind and by the erosion. As in a noir film from the 1950s or as in a poem by the Argentine Lepoldo Lugones, the game of light and shadow come to frame a set of art works, which the sculptor completes with her technique and sensitivity, but whose primal traces can be found in nature and in the most ancient history of art that fascinated Herzog, the director of “The Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
Thus, the hands that shape the clay continue, almost unconsciously, the work that the water and the wind began when they shaped the rocks. Rocks like these from Leibenberg, or, as she has decided, heavy “sand dreams, that offer a beautiful reward, full of meaning".
