Lucia Nogueira
Lucia Nogueira, gallery view © The Estate of Lucia Nogueira, courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.
Annely Juda Fine Art, London
22 September – 29 October 2016
Lucia Nogueira collected everyday objects that she found on the streets of London or in secondhand shops, and adapted them as works of art. For Nogueira, discarded objects had a surprising potential. Her sculptures and installations have an uncanny quality, her found objects released from their ordinary function and given some other meaning. That meaning, however, is difficult to pin down. Artist Liam Gillick once wrote of Nogueira’s skill of “taking things that are close to hand and imbuing them with malignancy and magic”, and those terms, “malignancy” and “magic”, perfectly capture the atmosphere created by the works currently on show at Annely Juda Fine Art.
Nogueira was born in 1950 in the town of Goiânia in central Brazil. In 1975, she made a visit to her brother in London, and ended up staying there until her untimely death in 1998. She studied painting at Chelsea College of Art (1976-79) and after at the Central School of Art and Design (1979-80). Following her first solo exhibition at the Carlile Gallery in north London in 1988, she had major shows at the Serpentine Gallery and the Chisenhale Gallery, among others.
Lucia Nogueira, gallery view © The Estate of Lucia Nogueira, courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art and Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.
Many of the works on show at Annely Juda demonstrate Nogueira’s extraordinary eye for placing random objects in conversation with each other. In one piece, titled Step (1995), shards of broken glass are scattered at either end of an oriental rug. There is nothing unusual about a rug placed on the floor, but it is the broken glass that unsettles this ordinary object. The viewer is given no indication of what the shards once were as a whole, or what event – real or imaginary – caused the object to be shattered and violently flung across either side of the carpet. The objects that make up Step are juxtaposed: with the shards of broken glass scattered as they are, the carpet is no safe ground for stepping on.
Step forms the centrepiece of the show at Annely Juda, and around it other ambivalent conversations between objects unfold. Another piece, titled At Will and The Other (1989), is composed of two metal frames, two feather pillows and a bag of black beans. The objects sit uncomfortably together, their relationship even more incongruous than that of Step. The dried black beans reappear in Untitled (1990) but, despite Nogueira’s Brazilian heritage, we are told that they are not an extension of this, nor of Brazilian art. Neither does her work reflect London’s art scene at the time – instead, Nogueira’s sculptures and installations manage to circumvent any cultural classification.
Read full article at studiointernational.com