The inaugural exhibition at Luhring Augustine Tribeca (17 White Street, New York, NY) will present the first U.S. solo show of the late London-based, Brazilian-born Lucia Nogueira (1950-1998). Over the course of her brief but remarkable career, the artist created a compelling multidisciplinary body of work. Primarily centered on her haunting and minimal sculptures and installations, her practice also incorporated drawing and video. Organized in collaboration with Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London, this exhibition will introduce American audiences to a seminal and underrecognized artist.
Nogueira often created sculptures that incorporated found, broken, and abandoned objects, subtly transforming these inanimate materials to imbue them with a corporeal and psychological resonance. For instance, Mischief (1995) consists of a seatless wooden chair from which a trail of connected trash bags mysteriously extends across the floor. In Bald Fact (1995), a flagpole holds no flag, flying instead a single piece of almost imperceptible clear tape that stretches to the wall at eye-level, creating a fragile and ambiguous barrier. Running throughout Nogueira’s work are a number of coexistent dualities: fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, order and chaos. Her investigation of the relationship between the body and space, and the unsettling and poetic quality threading through her work, can be attributed in part to her experience living and working outside her native culture.
Drawing was of crucial importance to Nogueira’s practice, and served as an act of discovery that also aided in her sculptural works. Her early drawings were primarily figurative in nature, exemplified in works such as Twelves Stations of the Cross (1983), a suite of watercolor and graphite works on paper. In such drawings, bodies are elongated, headless, doubled, leaning, and stretching across the page, occasionally maimed or obscured from view. Many later drawings are closely related to her sculptures and installations, while others feature recurring motifs of an array of animals and quotidian objects that simultaneously evoke a sense of playfulness and foreboding. Throughout her works on paper, whether figurative or abstracted, bold colors are juxtaposed with delicate forms that seem to float in space and transform in different degrees of legibility. The exhibition will be accompanied by a digital catalogue, featuring an essay by the independent curator Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro, former Director and Chief Curator of the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, and Curator of the 33rd São Paulo Bienal.
About the Artist
Lucia Nogueira studied Journalism and Communications in Brasilia and photography in Washington, D.C. In 1975 she visited London, where she would live and work 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 of Nogueira’s work was staged at the Museu Serralves in Porto, Portugal in 2007, and a focused presentation was featured in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo in 2018. Her work is in the collection of Tate, London, UK; Arts Council England, UK; Leeds City Art Gallery, UK; Henry Moore Foundation, UK; Museu Serralves, Portugal; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Portugal; The Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), Spain; and many other important international collections.