Elizabeth Xi Bauer is pleased to present We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things, a two-person exhibition bringing together works by Jandyra Waters (b. Brazil, 1921–2025), who was considered one of the pioneers of abstractionism in Brazil, and contemporary artist Theodore Ereira-Guyer (b. UK, 1990). The exhibition stages a cross-temporal dialogue between artists whose practices are separated by decades but aligned by notions of time, scale, and geographic resonance.
The curatorial premise of this exhibition draws attention to the affinities between both artists at important moments in their careers. All but one of Waters’ paintings on show were produced in the early 1960s, when she was in her early forties. Ereira-Guyer’s body of work, by turn, was made throughout 2025, as he approaches his late thirties – in a similar stage of their lives. Waters’ paintings embody a process of inquiry rather than resolution—an approach that connects deeply with Ereira-Guyer, who also works through intuition and risk rather than predetermined outcomes. His new works are responses to Waters’ surfaces, colour palette, and sense of animated movement, leading him to work with new material considerations for this exhibition. We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things presents an equal number of works by each artist, closely matched in scale, to further underscore this conversation through proximity rather than contrast.
Waters’ and Ereira-Guyer’s practices are inflected by transnational experience. Waters lived in the UK for three years as part of a post-war humanitarian initiative, where she studied, exhibited, formed poignant relationships, and married, all of which shaped her artistic voice. In turn, Ereira-Guyer continues to sustain active ties with Brazil through consistent residencies and exhibitions. He has a passion and curiosity for the country, making his dialogue with Waters both material and geographical. For example, in 2017 Ereira-Guyer completed a residency at Pivô, and in 2022 he participated in both a residency and an exhibition through The Bridge Project’s Time Lapse, all of which were in São Paulo. Ereira-Guyer exhibited in Elizabeth Xi Bauer’s group exhibition Warm Sun Cold Rain in 2023, in São Paulo, with several local artists; these experiences greatly influenced his practice, including the artist collecting and incorporating organic material, such as seeds, bringing elements from his surroundings into the timeless space of his works.
The smaller works in the exhibition, made within a style broadly associated with Tachisme, mark a transitional stage in Jandyra Waters’ practice. In these canvases, she begins to abandon an earlier flirtation with figuration—the entry point for many artists—and turns instead toward a more personal language. Their coarse, spatula-worked surfaces obscure enigmatic shapes, distorted forms, and a darker palette, embodying a raw, investigative energy that reveals Waters’ search for her own voice. From this period of experimentation emerges the magnificent large diptych of 1967, anchoring the presentation. Executed in the vibrant organic-geometric style that would define her career, the diptych embodies the new voice forged through her dwellings with Tachisme abstraction. Together, these works illuminate a pivotal moment of transition in Waters’ trajectory—an evolution that resonates with the exploratory phase in which Ereira-Guyer now finds himself.
Theodore Ereira-Guyer’s recent works—etched plaster layered with coloured glass—mark a bold expansion of his practice. They extend his long-standing ideas regarding memory, material, and landscape, while working with reactions to light and a sculptural dimension. This is his most extensive showing to date of the glass-and-plaster works, which evolved from his earlier large-scale etchings on paper, paper stitched to fabric, and into plaster. Ereira-Guyer first introduced glass into his practice in the 2024 Sleeping Lions solo exhibition at Elizabeth Xi Bauer, a turning point that opened new possibilities in surface, luminosity, and atmosphere. The interplay of plaster and glass produces shifting, refracted images that echo the elusive quality of memory. Irregularities in the handmade glass—sourced from Germany’s Glashütte Lamberts—act like lenses, blurring what lies beneath and heightening the tension between clarity and opacity.
Ereira-Guyer describes these works as capturing “twilight, when light dances on the tops of trees, a moment of anticipation before night falls.” He further describes this as ‘’[It’s] a time when the mind begins to wander, and imagination takes flight. The title Nameless patience refers to the end of the day, the quiet expectancy of night, and the wait for that fleeting magic to begin. And then, before we realise it, it’s gone.”
We Lost Lots of Beautiful Things foregrounds process, transition, and focal points in artistic careers—privileging dialogue over statement, emergence over conclusion. It situates Waters and Ereira-Guyer within a shared lineage of experimentation that traverses continents and generations. This pairing underscores how formative stages of artistic practice can hold their own radical power. By relating Waters’ developmental works alongside Ereira-Guyer’s evolving use of glass, the exhibition emphasises artistic becoming rather than legacy: the value of works that chart risk and discovery, and what could come next. This exhibition is not only about influence but about possibility: how past practices can be reimagined as spaces of unfolding, and how the exploratory might carry the most profound resonance for the present and the future.