Solaris
A solo exhibition by Raquel Figueira
at D-Unit, Bristol
For her first solo show in Bristol, Raquel Figueira introduces a new body of work that expands her practice in painting and drawing into spatial forms. Working with materials sourced from scrap metal dealers in East London, she engages in tactile interventions – marking, bending, scratching, coating – on discarded metal objects at various stages of collapse.
The works inhabit a fragile economy between utility and obsolescence, asking what kinds of knowledge might surface through gesture, improvisation and impulse. Industrial debris becomes a site of friction and interference, gesturing toward troubled energetic flows at human and cosmic scales.
Painting and drawing are present, but here the artist engages primarily with their undoing. Suggesting a space that resists resolution, they become a process of attuning to shifting relations and material encounters. Through a constellation of ephemeral formations, Solaris turns to precarity and adaptation as ways of inhabiting a time of planetary ends.
Artist Bio
Raquel Figueira was born in Lisbon, Portugal and is based in London, UK. A graduate of Goldsmiths (University of London) and Central Saint Martins (University of the Arts London), her work has been exhibited in various galleries including recent group shows It Rose and It Fell at Terrace Gallery, In Formation at Thames-side Studios Gallery, and In Response at The Nunnery Gallery, London. She completed the TURPS Correspondence Course and was an artist-in-residence at Cel Del Nord in Oristà, Spain.
D-Unit
Durnford St, Ashton Gate, Bristol BS3 2AW
Exhibition dates
29th and 30th November 2025, 12–4 pm
Opening event
Friday 28th November, 6–9PM
With a live electroacoustic performance by Matarkie