Pace Gallery, London | October 14 – November 15
“You must not be afraid to create.” This line from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel serves as both the title and guiding principle for Brazilian artist Sonia Gomes’ life and work. Her first solo exhibition in the UK, É preciso não ter medo de criar at Pace Gallery in London, curated by Paulo Miyada, showcases Gomes’ textile-based practice, now enriched with new materials like bronze and gold leaf.
Born in 1948, Gomes grew up in Brazil’s textile-rich Minas Gerais region. Her lifelong connection to fabric, thread, and second-hand textiles has become her signature artistic language. Each piece—a tablecloth, a shirt, a curtain—transforms into a carrier of personal and collective memory. Gomes’ practice brings to the forefront the labor-intensive, often invisible production processes of Afro-diasporic culture. Every knot and stitch forms a bridge between past and present: fragile yet resilient, quiet yet persistent.
In this exhibition, Gomes adds a new dimension to her familiar textile sculptures. The bronze casts on display are molded from branches and tree roots wrapped in fabric, embodying a permanence born from fragility. These sculptures juxtapose the hardness of metal with the softness of cloth. On another wall, fragments of 19th-century liturgical garments meet gold-leafed antique wood, creating an almost timeless scene where the sacred and the everyday, deprivation and splendor, intertwine.
At the heart of the exhibition is the large-scale installation Tereza (2025), which unites Gomes’ previously unfinished suspended sculptures into a single structure. In Brazilian prisons, “Tereza” refers to ropes woven from bedsheets for escape. Gomes transforms this term into a symbol of liberation: fabrics bearing the weight of the past hang in the air, memories turning into a kind of dance.
Two new sculptures from her Torção (torsion) series are also featured. Construction rebar and wire, wrapped, woven, and knotted with fabric, act like drawings, oscillating between line and form. Gomes uses industrial fabrics as a color palette and handmade lace as a compositional tool. The spiral forms extend freely, like remnants of bodily movement, with some ends left dangling in the air, as if passing an unfinished sense of continuation to the viewer.
The accompanying book, Assombrar o mundo com Beleza (“Haunting the World with Beauty”), reads like a manifesto of Gomes’ artistic approach. Her work represents an aesthetic that derives beauty not from fragility but from resistance. On the worn surface of fabric, there’s a sense of healing against time. Each stitch holds a memory, each act of binding echoes like a breath.
In Gomes’ practice, material is not just a medium but a form of testimony. Whether fabric, bronze, or wire, everything becomes a gesture of resistance in her hands. As Lispector’s phrase suggests, for Gomes, fearlessness in creation is not just artistic courage but a way of existing. This exhibition at Pace Gallery reminds us that beauty is not an outcome but a process: a process of reconnecting, repairing, and living.
Sonia Gomes’ work once again proves that art can be quiet but never static. In the threads of fabric, the hardness of bronze, and the rhythm of stitches, a breath circulates. This exhibition is the echo of that breath: calm yet powerful, delicate yet enduring.
Apartment No: 26 Note
Gomes’ work feels like a prayer woven on Brazil’s looms; each loop is a remembrance, each stitch a rebirth.
