Working across a variety of mediums, including painting, drawing, installation, ceramics, sculpture, and video, Solange Pessoa’s practice is rooted in social and natural history. Her works draw inspiration from the Baroque, Tropicália, Land art, Surrealism, and poetry. For more than three decades, Pessoa has experimented with an aesthetic that values the organic over the geometric, breaking from the abstracted grids and shapes that defined many of the Brazilian artists of her generation. Pessoa hails from Minas Gerais, Brazil’s mining country, and her work is duly informed by humanity’s relationship to the earth, interpreted through environmental concerns, time, intuition, and primordial memory.

Untitled is just an example of the ways in which her work evokes ancestral memory. The piece also responds to the organic shapes of her sculptures, to which her paintings are sometimes adjacent.

Solange Pessoa (b. 1961, Ferros, Minas Gerais, Brazil) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The artist has held solo exhibitions at Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (2013); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2008); Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto (2000); Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte (1995); and Centro Cultural São Paulo (1992); among others. Pessoa is a recipient of a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (1996–97) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and internationally, including Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018); Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015, 2016); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil (2008); Bienal do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2003); CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil (1999); among others. Her work is represented in the collections of the Jardim do Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Salão Nacional de Arte de Belo Horizonte; Museu Mineiro – Secretaria Estadual de Cultura, Belo Horizonte; Ringier Collection, Zurich; and the Rubell Museum, Miami; among others.