Sonia Gomes – Haunting the World With Beauty

Sonia Gomes – Assombrar o mundo com beleza presents a selection of works produced in the last 15 years by Minas Gerais artist Sonia Gomes, one of the foremost names in Brazilian contemporary arts. Through fabric work, Sonia Gomes “plastic poetry”, as the artist calls her creation, deals with themes such as identity, memory and temporality.

Edited by Paulo Miyada, artistic director of the Tomie Ohtake Institute and adjunct
curator of the Centre Pompidou, the book is composed of pictures of the works, records of exhibitions, personal drawing and poetry journals, a shrine section — featuring the artist’s objects and letters, prepared by featured researcher Beta Germano —, as well as pictures by Lita Cerqueira of Sonia Gomes in her workshop. Therefore, the edition includes the artist’s works as well as personal aspects of their production.

The book also features essays written by various authors about the artist and her work, such as writer and poet Leda Maria Matins, neuroscientist Sidarta Ribeiro, Tate Modern curator Michael Wellen, TBA21-Academy’s The Current IV curator Yina Jiménez Suriel, as well as the book’s own editor and researcher Paulo Miyada.

According to Paulo Miyada, the artist’s output “is a powerful recent contemporary
expression of a lineage of Brazilian artists who build on the repetition of minimal
gestures with materials of little market value, spending time, transforming substance, delineating shapes, extrapolating scales and reaching a very particular kind of monumentality.”

About the artist
Sonia Gomes’s work is woven in the duration of time. The artist chooses materials with their own colors, textures, fits and undefinable set of memories. Each piece of clothing, fabric and accessory she uses has traveled their own trajectory, being worn, kept and traded before being transformed in her workshop. Through a combination of actions such as crumpling, twisting, stretching, tightening, hanging and wrapping, Gomes turns sewing into a kind of drawing. Her gestures create strokes while, at the same time, fixing stages of fabric manipulation, linking, balancing and connecting pieces in a body that, as if it's growing, gradually takes shape and establishes a relation to the overarching space. Born in Caetanópolis, in Minas Gerais, in 1948, Sonia Gomes’s relationship to art came from a permanent need that led her to make a broad swath of textile creations that had no access to circulation. The insertion of her work in the scope of contemporary art comes from the ambition of recreating the world around her through gestures of care, starting with the intimacy of the body, of clothing and of home.

About the editor
Paulo Miyada is a contemporary arts researcher and curator. He holds a Master’s degree in Architecture and Urbanism Art from the College of Architecture and Urbanism at São Paulo University (FAU-USP), where he also studied as an undergraduate. He is the artistic director of the Tomie Ohtake Institute (São Paulo) and adjunct curator of Centre Pompidou (Paris). He was adjunct curator of the 34th São Paulo Biennale (2019-21) and of the 34th Panorama da Arte Brasileira at MAM-SP (2015). Among his curated exhibitions, some highlights are AI-5 50 Anos – Ainda Não Terminou de Acabar (2018), Anna Maria Maiolino – PSSSIIIUUU... (2022) and Ensaios para o Museu das Origens (2023).

Specifications
Title Sonia Gomes – Assombrar o mundo com beleza [Sonia Gomes – Haunting the World With Beauty]
Artist Sonia Gomes
Editor Paulo Miyada
Featured researcher Beta Germano
Essay authors Leda Maria Martins, Paulo Miyada, Michael Wellen, Sidarta Ribeiro, Yina Jiménez Suriel
Photographic Essay Lita Cerqueira
Translators Carolina Alfaro, Christopher Peterson, Julia Sobral Campos, Silvia Massimini Felix, Eric Moses, Lynnea Hansen
Language Portuguese/English
Page count 320
Publisher Cobogó
ISBN  978-65-5691-151-9
Design Greco Design
Format Hardcover
Size 22.5 x 29 cm
Year 2024
Price R$ 260.00