Luhring Augustine is pleased to present the work of Ritsue Mishima and Lucia Nogueira in its third year participating in FOG Design + Art. Mishima’s blown-glass sculptures and Nogueira’s watercolor and ink drawings share similar formal underpinnings, such as the abstraction of figurative imagery, and the emotive use of dramatic light and bold shadows. For both Mishima and Nogueira, living and practicing in a culture outside their native country lends a unique sensibility to their work.
Employing ancient Venetian glassmaking techniques, Mishima reinvigorates the thousand-year-old practice with her unique modern perspective. Textured and multidimensional, her work reflects and manipulates light, simultaneously illuminating their settings and becoming embedded within the surroundings. Her sculptures illustrate the constant state of fluctuation inherent to glass, caught between solid and liquid states, stillness and movement. Relying on the juxtaposition of light and shadow to reveal each work’s complexities, Mishima plays with paradoxes: transient and eternal, delicate and resilient, uneven and refined; the sculptures are ever-changing.
Over the course of her short career the Brazilian-born, London-based artist Lucia Nogueira created a deeply compelling and remarkable body of work. While primarily concerned with sculpture and installation, drawing was an integral part of her practice. Nogueira's work captures liminal spaces that remain both unsettling and poetic, and set the fragile and delicate alongside physical and emotional weight. Influenced in part by her experience as a Brazilian immigrant deeply involved in the British artistic scene of her time, Nogueira was compelled to explore the body’s relationship to place. She represented the inherent tension of her experience through coexistent dualities: fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, order and chaos. The compositions in her drawings undermine the laws of perspective and are disorienting to behold, with objects often hovering across the page and shapes transforming into different degrees of legibility.
About the Artists
Ritsue Mishima (b. 1962, Kyoto, Japan) lives and works between Kyoto and Venice. Recent solo exhibitions include LUMINA, Luhring Augustine, New York (2019), Cristal Blanc, Galerie Pierre Marie Giraud, Brussels (2017), Istante, Brutto Gusto, Berlin (2016), In Grimani: Ritsue Mishima Glass Works, Museum of Palazzo Grimani, Venice, Italy (2013), and Frozen Garden/Fruits of Fire, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2010). In 2001, Ritsue Mishima won the Giorgio Armani Prize for Best Artist at Sotheby's Contemporary Decorative Arts Exhibition, London and, in 2012, was the recipient of the Bavarian State Award at Exempla 2012: Glass-Material Between Tradition and Innovation, Munich.
Lucia Nogueira (b. 1950, Goiânia, Brazil – d.1998, London, England) studied Journalism and Communications in Brasilia and photography in Washington, D.C. before visiting London in 1975, where she stayed for the rest of her life. She studied painting first at Chelsea College of Art (1976–79) and then at the Central School of Art and Design (1979–80). She was the recipient of a Fondation Cartier residential fellowship at Versailles in 1993 and was a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award winner in 1996. A retrospective exhibition was staged at the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portgual in 2007. Her work is in the collection of the Tate, London, The Arts Council England, Leeds City Art Gallery, UK, The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, UK, Museu Serralves, Portugal, and many other important international collections.
For information on Ritsue Mishima, please contact Rana Saner at 212.206.9100 or rana@luhringaugustine.com.
For information on Lucia Nogueira, please contact Donald Johnson-Montenegro at 212.206.9100 or donald@luhringaugustine.com.
For press requests, please contact:
Resnicow and Associates
Megan Ardery / Christina Ludgood / Sarah McNaughton
mardery@resnicow.com / cludgood@resnicow.com / smcnaughton@resnicow.com
212.671.5181 / 212.671.5178 / 212.671.5161
