Blum & Poe is pleased to announce the representation of Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. Pessoa is known for her sculptures, installations, videos, and paintings that present forms mined from primal realms of the psyche. Organic materials yielded from animals, minerals, and vegetation -- human hair, leather, oil, fat, wax, animal blood, roots, moss, seeds, and eggs, among others -- serve as variables in the articulation of a collective knowing, primordial blueprints that guide our perceptions of time, biology, and metaphysics.
Often her work is intended for outdoor placement amongst the elements, objects buried partially in the earth or hanging on the walls of a garden. Her films feature human actors and animals sometimes cloaked in skins or cocoon-like pouches, with materials that conjure visceral processes and protective barriers only found in nature. Pessoa's large-scale installations can take on bodily features -- long, snaking coils of fur or bulbous plush figures that succumb to gravity. The artist makes reference to her homeland both in tradition and in medium, often using the soapstone from the local quarries to carve the biomorphic shapes of her Mimesmas series that represents the female organ as well as primeval fossils. Pessoa's Botânica paintings are pigmented with Genipapo and Lineaca --native oils and dyes used by indigenous Mineiro tribes for medicinal purposes and body painting.
The artist's first solo exhibition in the US was presented at Blum & Poe Los Angeles in the fall of 2017. Newly commissioned sculptural works by Pessoa are currently on view at Skulpturen Park Köln, Germany, and a forthcoming monograph on her practice will launch in fall 2018, edited by curators Alex Bacon and Cecilia Fajardo, and including essays by Fajardo, Eduardo Jorge, Chus Martínez, and Liz Munsell.
Solange Pessoa (Ferros, Brazil, 1961) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Selected solo exhibitions include Metaflor-Metaflora, Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2013); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2008); Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto, Brazil (2000); Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (1995); and Centro Cultural São Paulo, Brazil (1992). Pessoa received a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (1996/1997), and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad including New Shamans (2016), High Anxiety (2016), and No Man's Land (2015), Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Arte e Patrimônio, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2014); Mostra do Redescobrimento, CAPC Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Heranças Contemporâneas (1999), Encontros e Tendências (1993), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo, Brazil. Examples of Pessoa's work are permanently displayed at the garden of the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2008), and the Capela Nosso Senhor do Bonfim, Santa Bárbara, Brazil (2004).