Solange Pessoa

Solange Pessoa (born 1961, Ferros, Brazil) is a Brazilian contemporary artist known for installations, sculptures, drawings, and paintings that incorporate organic materials and explore relationships between nature and culture and is recognised, in Brazil and internationally, for her contributions to contemporary installation art, conceptual art, and sculpture.

Biography Solange Pessoa is from the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, a "high place of the colonial baroque now an industrial force 'thanks' to its activities of iron extraction."

She has been making art since the 1980s, incorporating organic materials into her work from early in her career.

Critic Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira, in an academic essay on Pessoa's Cathedral, writes that her practice "performs a material philosophy of abjection and embodiment, where hair, leather, and wax become living forces rather than inert matter." This emphasis on organic substances situates Pessoa within broader debates in contemporary eco-art and feminist theory.

Exhibitions The artist has held solo exhibitions at Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Tramway, Glasgow; Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria; Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte; Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte; Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto; Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte; and Centro Cultural São Paulo. Other significant group exhibitions include "Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles" at the Barbican Centre, London; "Reclaim the Earth" at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); and "Living Worlds" at Fondation Cartier, Lille.

Artistic Practice Pessoa works with sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, ceramics, and video. Venice Biennale noted she has been "incorporating organic materials into her enigmatic and fantastical work, creating primordial and ritualistic forms that beat with both life and are muted by the spectre of death."

Her signature installation Bags (1994) "consists of burlap sacks filled with soil, plant matter, bones, seeds, and poems, creating what she describes as "a kind of great universal archive, diverse and infinite, which houses thick materialities (physical and symbolic) in a relationship between nature and culture." The work has been updated and exhibited in various iterations, including versions at Ballroom Marfa and Aspen Art Museum. Frieze magazine noted in 2020 that Pessoa's "paintings and sculptures often feature natural materials – including leaves, roots, eggs, seeds and minerals – found at the artist's family farm in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais" and that "as in many of Pessoa's works, nature has been invited to take over." Her approach reflects her philosophy that "I dislike the separation of culture and nature. I have this imagination of an integrated philosophy, a natural philosophy, which incorporates culture as part of nature." In 2023, Kunsthaus Bregenz produced a major 224-page catalogue on Pessoa, situating her alongside an art historical context of artists engaging with materiality and landscape.

Pessoa has served as a teacher and mentor to younger Brazilian artists. The New York Times reported that rising artist Luana Vitra studied under Pessoa at the art school of the State University of Minas Gerais.