There is a kind of artist who treats the studio as a kitchen. Diambe da Silva is one of them. The Brazilian artist, born in Rio in 1993, mixes egg yolk and pigment by hand to make tempera. They cast bronze from beeswax models that started as gestures with the fingers. They keep bees. The work that comes out of all this is patient in a way that contemporary art often forgets to be.
Last autumn at Kaufmann Repetto in New York, Diambe filled the gallery with novas mucosas, a series of trans-species figures somewhere between insect, root and human. The patinated bronzes looked freshly pulled from the hive. The painted landscapes around them throbbed with the same warm sweetness. Honey honey honey, they called the show, after the smell that had followed them through every stage of making it. It was a quiet exhibition that worked on you slowly.
Now Kunsthalle Basel is preparing Diambe's largest institutional outing to date, opening early next year as Bees beings beans. New sculptures, new paintings and a new film will move together like a choreography, oscillating between loss and rebirth. The bees, again, are both subject and collaborator. So is the climate that is making their lives shorter.
What moves me about this work is the refusal of speed. Lost-wax casting takes months. Egg tempera dries in seconds and demands you go back tomorrow. Diambe builds practices that match the materials, not deadlines. The result feels closer to ritual than to the white-cube circuit.
There is also the politics, never far below the surface. Diambe is non-binary, Black, and trained in Brazilian performing arts before sculpture. The diaspora references, the food roots, the tropical patterning, the bee as a colonial-era survivor — none of this is decoration. It is the work asking what it means to belong to a body, a species, a country, a temperature.
Go see it slowly. Stand close enough to the bronze that you can almost taste the wax. Diambe is making the kind of art that rewards a second visit.
