Laura Lima’s (b. 1971, Brazil) practice employs a variety of media often incorporating living organisms and actions that are performed for long periods of time, to explore ways in which human behaviour alters our perception of the everyday.

Since letting a cow loose on Ipanema Beach in the mid-1990s, Laura Lima has continued to present a body of work consisting of what she sometimes describes as ‘images’. Consistently escaping easy classification, Laura Lima’s ‘images’ are ‘neither performance nor installation nor cinema’, but rather attempts to visually link, in concrete reality, a personal glossary that the artist has worked and reworked throughout the more than twenty years of her career. Another component of Lima’s work relates to the notion of ornamental philosophy. In projects such as Costumes, Galinhas de Gala, and Ouro Flexível, Lima directly challenges the conventional view of ornamentation as being something strange or unimportant. Lima’s work seeks to propose new understandings of accepted definitions and concepts, destabilising and subverting what is taken for granted.

Born in 1971, Laura Lima grew up in Governador Valadares in the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil. While still very young, she moved to Rio de Janeiro, where she lives and works. The artist has a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro in the 1990s, and studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro. In 1999, she founded Organism RhR (Representative hyphen Representative), where she served as its first administrator. In 2003, she co-founded A Gentil Carioca together with Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, a gallery headed by artists in Rio de Janeiro, where she still serves as a board member.

Laura Lima was the recipient of the Bonnefanten Award for Contemporary Art (BACA), in 2014, and the Marcantonio Vilaça Award in 2006. The artist was also nominated for the Francophone Award in 2011 and the Han Nefkens Award in 2012.

Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.