LENORA DE BARROS

Lives and works in São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

A visual artist and poet, Lenora de Barros began her career in the 1970s. With a degree inLinguistics from the Universidade de São Paulo, her first works can be placed in the field of “visualpoetry”, associated with the concrete poetry of the 1950s. In 1983, she published a book of poemscalled Onde Se Vê. Some of them dispensed with the use of words, being constructed asphotographic sequences of performative acts. In the same year, she took part in the 17th Bienal deSão Paulo with visual poems in videotext. Since then, Lenora has built a poetics marked by the useof various languages: video, performance, photography, sound installation and object construction.

In 1990 she moved to Milan, Italy, where she stayed for a year, holding her first solo exhibition,Poesia É Coisa de Nada, at the Galeria Mercato del Sale. In this show, Lenora inaugurates the Ping-Poems series by scattering five thousand ping-pong balls on the gallery floor with the phrase titleprinted on them. Between 1993 and 1996 she wrote an experimental column for Jornal da Tarde, inSão Paulo, entitled ... umas. From the column emerged works and ideas that became autonomousvideos and photo performances over the next years. In 2013, the 65 columns and 2 videoperformances were exhibited for the first time at Casa Laura Alvim, in Rio de Janeiro, and in 2014they were presented at Pivô, in São Paulo.

In 2017, she took part in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, curatedby Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the BrooklynMuseum in New York (2018). The show went on to the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2018.Her most important group and solo exhibitions include Não Vejo a Hora [I Can’t Wait], at Gomide&Co(São Paulo, 2023), her participation in the 59th Biennale di Venezia - The Milk of Dreams (Venice,2022), Lenora de Barros: minha língua, at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2022), RETROMEMÓRIA, at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM-SP (2022), Tools for Utopia:Selected works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection, at the Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, 2020),ISSOÉOSSODISSO, at the Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo, 2016), 4th ThessaloníkiBiennial of Contemporary Art (Greece, 2013), 11th Lyon Biennial (France, 2011), as well as participationin the 17th, 24th and 30th editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1983, 1998 and 2012).Museum ofModern Art, São Paulo (2022), Tools for Utopia: Selected works from the Daros LatinamericaCollection, at Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, 2020), ISSOÉOSSODISSO, at Oficina Cultural Oswald deAndrade (São Paulo, 2016), 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Greece, 2013), 11th LyonBiennale (France, 2011), as well as participating in the 17th, 24th and 30th editions of the Bienal deSão Paulo (1983, 1998 and 2012).

Her work is part of important collections in Brazil and in several countries, including theHammer Museum (Los Angeles, United States), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona -MACBA (Barcelona, Spain), Daros Latinamerica Collection (Zurich, Switzerland), Museo NacionalCentro de Arte Reina Sofía (Madrid, Spain), Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM-SP andPinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.

Courtesy Gomide&Co