FRIEZE MASTERS

Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel and Sadie Coles HQ co-present Lucia Laguna (Campo dos Goytacazes, 1941) at FriezeMasters, as part of the Studio section, curated by Sheena Wagstaff, which explores the role of the workspace in the practiceof contemporary artists. The selection of works features paintings and drawings ranging from 2004 to 2023, allowing for acomprehensive view of the artist’s investigations of abstract space and multilayered figuration. Three distinct series arepresented here; the early works in Entre a Linha Vermelha e a Linha Amarela and Pequenos Formatos, investigategeometric abstraction in small formats. Her later Paisagem series, introduces figurative elements into Laguna’s painterlyenvironment, with recognizable shapes such as a fountain, tiles or a façade emerging among the displaced fragments oflandscape. Laguna’s home and studio in suburban Rio de Janeiro, filled with objects, books and illustrations she collects,serves as an incubator for the forms and images that make up her paintings. All inevitably find their way into hercompositions in acrylic or oil. The sprawling views of houses clustered on hills, the sky and vegetation she sees from herwindow and garden are a constant source of visual references. The artist structures her paintings according to her particularmethod of pictorial collage, dependent on the accumulation of graphic information on the canvas as much as the methodicerasure of pre-existing forms. Incomplete images and a saturated subtropical palette are fused in the artist’s dissembledformal coherence, with an appetite for citing imagery and prints, tweaking objects past recognition, subverting scale andperspective.