Solange Pessoa

Solange Pessoa works with different media: sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, ceramics, and video. Her art makes reference to nature. Hailing from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, Pessoa finds primal creativity in the cycle of life, often using organic materials in her works such as earth, moss, wax, leather, blood, or feathers. These substances possess life-giving energies.

For an exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in 2022, she presented an expansive object made of human hair. That year at the Venice Biennale, she used the lawn in a garden at the exit of the Arsenale as the setting for several of her soapstone sculptures. Pessoa is fascinated by the colonial Baroque architecture of her home city and especially by the soapstone there, known for its softness and diversity of tonalities. The white, velvety soft stones evoke ancient, archetypal forms like prehistoric stone drawings and shell fossils. Pessoa gives them shape with carvings and cavities. Rainwater collects in their hollows, mosses begin to grow, and small creatures settle in them. After a short time, life inhabits the sculptural pools.

At Kunsthaus Bregenz, Solange Pessoa will be continuing the narrative. She draws attention to the regional and unifying, inextricably linking her works and the place where they are shown. As in her artistic practice to date, Pessoa makes the site, local natural materials, and the region’s cultural history itself the subject of her exhibition. For her installations, the artist will gather raw materials found in the region: soil, plants, fruit, animal bones, and feathers, which she then fills into objects and containers. Existing works will continue to grow further, interconnected with the exhibition site, and new works will be on view for the first time at Kunsthaus Bregenz.

For the KUB Billboards alongside Bregenz Seestrasse, Solange Pessoa has selected six works from her 2021 series Sonhíferas for the Billboards, extending her KUB exhibition into public space.

Solange Pessoa (b. 1961 Ferros, Brazil) lives in Belo Horizonte. Solo exhibitions of her work have been shown at the Museu Mineiro in Belo Horizonte, at the Centro Cultural São Paulo, at the Ballroom Marfa, Texas and at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris. Pessoa has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and the Fondation Cartier, Lille. In 2022 her work was presented at the Venice Biennale.