Sonia Gomes combines secondhand textiles with everyday materials, such as furniture, driftwood, and wire, to create abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and feminised crafts from the margins of history.
Read MoreJuxtaposing tensile and slack forms, Gomes’s contorted sculptures exude a corporeality and dynamism that she attributes to her love of popular Brazilian dances. At the same time, her work’s vitality evokes the enigmatic animism of sacred objects used in the spiritual practices of Brazil’s African diaspora—rites that the artist witnessed her grandmother, a shaman, perform during her childhood. Born in the Brazilian city of Caetanópolis, a once-important manufacturing center for textiles, Gomes uses found or gifted fabrics, which, according to her, 'bring the history of the people that they belonged to.' 'I give a new significance to them,' she adds. Her assemblages thus tie Brazil’s historical trajectory to the long-disregarded narratives of women, people of color, and countless anonymous individuals.
Through its recycling of used fabric, Gomes’s work also evinces a principle of thrift that is both a consequence of Brazil’s rapid and uneven industrial development and a dissenting answer to its accompanying culture of wasteful consumption and environmental destruction. As a whole, her art is marked by a decolonizing impulse, providing oblique responses to the social inequities and ecological urgencies of present-day Brazil and, more broadly, a globalised world.
My work is black, it is feminine, and it is marginal. I am a rebel. I never worried about masking or stifling anything that might or might not fit standards of what is called art. —Sonia Gomes
Text courtesy Pace Gallery.
Despina Zefkili navigates the vast group exhibition Portals at NEON at the former Public Tobacco Factory in Athens.
Read More
Ocula Advisory spotlights Sonia Gomes's alchemical approach to sculpture.
Read More
The 19th edition of Videobrasil shifted all its programming towards the theme 'Southern Panoramas.' In other words, the Global South and its social fabric—its diasporas, hybrid identities, and migration flows.
Read More
We select our favourite works from Art Basel Miami Beach, which returns in full force after its 2020 cancellation.
Read More
Blum & Poe present an exhibition of work by Sonia Gomes, one of the most important living artists to have come out of Brazil.
Read More
Explore artwork highlights selected by the Advisory team and showing at artmonte-carlo.
Read More
With her New York debut on the horizon, the Afro-Brazilian artist, known for her seductive, textile-based sculptures, is finally, and rightfully, receiving international recognition.
Read More
BADEN-BADEN, Germany — Using recycled textiles, driftwood, and furniture, Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes creates oversized biomorphic sculptures that are palpably corporeal. In her Museum Frieder Burda
Read More
These women resist containment.
Read More
The exhibition of over 100 women artists currently on view at the Rubell Family Collection is difficult to review because the works do not all fit into the space and the decision was made to rotate them over the course of the show. The plan is to gradually replace some works with others, but because there doesn’t appear to be any overriding...
Read More
