Laura Lima | How To Eat The Sun and The Moon
Goodman Gallery is delighted to present Rio de Janeiro-based artist Laura Lima’s first major solo exhibition on the continent, How To Eat The Sun and The Moon. Featuring a series of new, large-scale textile pieces, the show explores Brazilian mythology, nature and the transformation of materials over time.
Over the past two decades, Lima has worked across multiple media including installation, cinema, textiles, and notions of performativity, always addressing philosophical aspects to offer an ongoing interrogation of conceptual frameworks people use to make sense of the world. Her practice also intimately engages with materiality, often inviting organic matter, degradation and the passage of time as agents in the formation and long-term existence of her works. The Johannesburg show follows Laura Lima: Balè Literal, a major solo exhibition held at MACBA in 2023 which will tour to MAM Rio de Janeiro in May 2025. A dedicated publication is due to be published later in the year by Cobogó.
The foundation for this body of work comes from Lima’s research on Brazilian folklore and spiritual imaginaries from the countryside, where she grew up. Her interest in the natural world and cultural syncretism histories is also represented materially through the use of dye extracted from plants and vegetables. The abstract fabric assemblages exist as floating structures suspended across the gallery space. Through the porosity of each work created by gaps in the woven structure, Lima encourages viewers to pause, move around and activate the performative energy that the show commands.
Artworks
About
Laura Lima
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.
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