The Divine Matter of All Things | ALEX TRIMINO | NICOLAS LEIVA

The Divine Matter of All Things

Before each thing became itself, it was everything.

Divine matter existed before all things separated and took form. It was the primordial union: a state without boundaries in which creation, space, and time were one undifferentiated mass of pure potential. Before the universe acquired order, there was chaos, not as disorder, but as a void holding every possible form. This was the prima materia, the root substance that contained the divine spark.

For the world to exist, that unity had to fragment. From its separation came bodies, creatures, elements, and time. Through ceramic, fiber, and illuminated forms, two artists evoke a shared world in which every form retains the memory of having once been everything else.

About the Artists:

ALEX TRIMINO

Alex Trimino is a Miami-based visual artist whose practice centers on illuminated fiber-based sculptures and installations. Her work recontextualizes traditional, low-tech crafts—including crochet, knitting, and weaving—to explore social perspectives on civilization, technology, and gender. By bringing together traditional techniques and contemporary technologies, Trimino creates a dialogue between past and present, examining how we perceive and connect with the world today.

Trimino was born in Colombia and lives and works in Miami, Florida. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Florida International University and attended the Ox-Bow Artist Residency, affiliated with the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, as a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship for Visual Artists.

Her work has been exhibited extensively in the United States and internationally, including OpenArt, an international art symposium in Sweden, and her solo exhibition Dark Light at the Örebro Museum (Läns Museum) in Örebro, Sweden. Trimino has received grants and awards from institutions including the Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum, the Elliott Museum, the Appleton Museum of Art, the Arts Rawls Museum, the Cambridge Art Association, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation.

She is represented by Diana Lowenstein Gallery in Miami.

 

NICOLAS LEIVA

Nicolás Leiva was born in Tucumán, Argentina, in 1958. In 1983, he graduated from the School of Arts at the National University of Tucumán and continued his studies in Buenos Aires. Leiva, who has always envisioned his career in global terms, held his first exhibition outside Argentina in 1989, at Jacobo Karpio Gallery in San José, Costa Rica.

In 1990, he moved to Miami, precisely at the moment when the city was consolidating its international prominence as a capital of Latin American art and an important center on the international contemporary art scene. His work soon became a widely recognized part of this boom.

Leiva has exhibited extensively and completed commissions throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe, as well as in South Africa and the Middle East.

Since 1996, Leiva has expanded his range of artistic genres beyond painting and drawing to include ceramics, as well as the painted treatment of industrial surfaces and objects such as automobiles, inflatables, motorcycles, surfboards, and guitars. He divides his time between Miami, where he maintains his own studio, and Faenza, Italy, where he produces ceramics at Bottega Gatti.

Leiva’s work is present in various international collections such as Texas University Museum, San Antonio, Texas, USA; Berardo Collection of Modern Art, Lisbon, Portugal; Marble Museum of Carrara, Carrara, Italy; MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires), Buenos Aires, Argentina; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA; MOLAA (Museum of Latin American Art), Long Beach, California, USA; Miami-Dade Community College, Mitchell Wolfson Campus, Miami, Florida, USA; Metro-Dade Cultural Resources, Miami, Florida, USA.