Artist Sonia Gomes’ (b. 1948, Brazil) practice forms a unique bridge between Western minimalism and Afro-diasporic crafts. She creates abstract sculptures that reclaim craft modes left on the margins of history by combining second-hand textiles with everyday materials such as birdcages, driftwood, and wires. In 2015, she was the only Brazilian artist invited by the late curator Okwui Enwezor to the Arsenale exhibition at the Venice Biennale, and in 2018, she became the first living Black woman artist to open a monographic exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo.
The exhibition’s title is taken from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart and has guided Gomes’ courage in adopting new materials and techniques for this show.
The Aesthetics of Fragility and Liberation For this exhibition, Gomes has created bronze sculptures for the first time. These forms, cast from fabric-wrapped tree knots and branches, highlight the tension between the fragility of the material and the sublime polish of bronze. This relationship continues in new wall works made from reclaimed timber, which the artist has transformed with gold leaf and fragments of 19th-century liturgical garments.
One of the most striking new works in the exhibition, Tereza (2025), unites a previously unrealized series of pendant works into a single, imposing form. In Brazilian Portuguese prison slang, “tereza” refers to makeshift ropes made from knotted sheets used in escape attempts. Gomes’ hanging work embodies the idea of textile remnants—carriers of collective and individual memory—escaping oblivion, thus concretizing their liberating connotation.
Cycles, Rituals, and New Language Gomes’ Torção (twist) sculptures begin from a single line, engaging the artist’s entire body in motion. She separates threads, laces, and knitted pieces from industrial materials, treating handcrafted textiles as a compositional tool and industrial products as a color palette. The paintings in the Raio de Sol (Sunbeam) series on view combine different media such as Posca markers, watercolor, and oil paint, evoking spiral forms embedded in cyclical concepts of time.
This exhibition underscores the artist’s ongoing global rise, continuing from her show at MASP (a first for a Black woman artist) and her recent participation in the Venice Biennale.
- Artist: Sonia Gomes
- Work Title: É preciso não ter medo de criar
- Venue: Pace Gallery, London
- Dates: Continues until 15 November 2025
