Lucia Nogueira
Slip, 1992
Glass bell jar, frosted glass, wax
37 1/8 x 18 1/4 x 16 1/8 inches
(94 x 46.5 x 41 cm)
Lucia Nogueira (1950–1998) was born and raised in Brazil and later based in London. Over the course of her brief but remarkable career she produced a compelling, multidisciplinary body of work that includes sculpture, installation, drawing, and video. Through her distinctive works, she explored the connections between object and language, with frequent allusions to the fragility of the human body and its relationship to space.
Nogueira’s practice was primarily centered on her poetic sculptures and installations, which incorporate found, broken, and abandoned objects. She subtly transformed these materials, imbuing them with a corporeal and psychological resonance. Running throughout her haunting and poignant oeuvre are a number of coexistent dualities: fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, order and chaos.
Drawing was also of crucial importance to Nogueira and served as an act of discovery that often aided in her sculptural works. Her early drawings are primarily figurative, displaying bodies that are elongated, headless, doubled, and occasionally maimed or obscured from view. While many later drawings are closely related to her three-dimensional works, others feature recurring motifs of an array of animals and quotidian objects that simultaneously evoke a sense of playfulness and foreboding.
Lucia Nogueira studied journalism and communications in Brasília and photography in Washington, D.C. In 1975 she visited London, where she would live and work for the rest of her life. She studied painting at Chelsea College of Art (1976–79) and 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 organized by the Fundação de Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto, Portugal in 2007, and a focused presentation of her work was featured in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo in Brazil in 2018. Her work is included in major international collections including Tate, London, UK; Arts Council England, UK; Leeds City Art Gallery, UK; Henry Moore Foundation, UK; Fundação de Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Portugal; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Portugal; Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Spain, among others.
Art Historian Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro speaks about the sculptural works of Brazilian artist Lucia Nogueira
For more information, please contact Leah Horowitz at leah@luhringaugustine.com.
