Solange Pessoa: Longilonge | Ballroom Marfa, Marfa, TX

November 15, 2019 – May 24, 2020

More information on the exhibition

Ballroom Marfa is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of noted Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. Pessoa has built a significant and internationally recognized body of work over three decades, which spans the mediums of painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, and video. The exhibition will include new commissions that respond to the cultural and natural landscape in West Texas, alongside important existing pieces made in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the artist lives and works. 

The title –  Longilonge –  refers to an invented word, found in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Pessoa repurposes this word to evoke a distant space or time, a longing for the unreachable, a sort of mythical place for feelings and memories, a region of temporal textures.

Pessoa's expressive and telluric art draws inspiration from myriad sources: nature, the Baroque, dreams and the unconscious, Tropicalia, prehistoric cave paintings and carved tools, Land Art, traditional craft, ancestry, Surrealism, and poetry. These and many other references lie under the surface of a fully developed lifework wrought from sustained material investigation, intuitive curiosity, and an acute command of gesture and form. 

Altogether five distinct bodies of work will converge for the show at Ballroom – displaying touch-points in the arc of the artist's career and creating a connective tissue of imagery, ideas, and relationships between two distant places in North and South America. 

Solange Pessoa (Ferros, 1961) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her selected solo exhibitions include Mendes Wood DM, New York, NY (2018); Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brazil (2016); 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 Invenção de Origem, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); La Fin de Babylone - Mich Wundert, dass ich so Fröhlich bin, KölnSkulptur #9, Cologne, Germany (2017); New Shamans (2016), High Anxiety (2016), and No Man's Land: Women Artists (2015), Rubell Family Collection, Miami, FL; Arte e Patrimônio, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2014); Mostra do Redescobrimento, CAPS Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Heranças Contemporâneas (1999), and Encontros e Tendências (1993), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo, Brazil. 

On Friday, November 15, Ballroom will host an opening reception for the exhibition with a live performance of Violin Phase by Steve Reich, performed throughout the gallery by Jeanann Dara and Ben Russell. The reception will be followed by an electrifying dance party with UJI at Lost Horse Saloon. On Saturday, November 16 at 11am Ballroom will host a guided exhibition walkthrough with the artist and curator.

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