Untitled, 2018

The works of Brazilian artist Fernanda Gomes call into question the very nature of their presence. Her transformation of everyday materials imparts power to that which, at first, seems barely there. This presentation includes recent works displayed on white walls under a white ceiling. The only paint the artist uses is white, which she cherishes as the ‘receptive color,’ revealing even the subtlest shifts in the tonality and intensity of the light. As Gomes puts it herself: ‘It's all about the immaterial…. The paradox is that the immaterial must be created from material, it must materialize, which is what really counts: the autonomy of the thing itself.’

Fernanda Gomes (born 1960 in Rio de Janeiro) has worked with ordinary materials whose formal idiom recalls Arte Povera, Brazilian Constructivism, and Minimalism since the 1980s. Her work exists between painting and sculpture, avoiding categorization, and blurring the boundaries between object and space, light and shadow, composition and dispersion. Gomes often makes her sculptural work on site, in correspondence with the architecture in which she is exhibiting. Solo museum exhibitions of her work have been held at Secession, Vienna (2019), and Fundación Jumex, Mexico City (2018). She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.