Torção is the largest and most significant example of Sônia Gomes' celebrated artistic production to appear at international auction. One of Brazil’s most prominent living artists, Gomes celebrates the Afro-Brazilian experience in her innovative sculptural practice. Throughout her oeuvre, Gomes explores issues of identity, race, and gender, while challenging traditional notions of art-making through a unique approach to materials and forms - responding to the erasure of Black women's voices in history and culture. Here, Gomes constructs a complex web of textiles, furniture remnants, driftwood and wire to build a resonant, geometric sculpture. Rooted deeply in Afro-Brazilian traditions of artmaking, its dynamic lines and rhythmic dimensions echo the corporeality of Brazilian dance while also nodding to Gomes' Neo-Concrete precedessors. Characterized by arbitrarily tangled webs of colorful fabrics, Gomes’s process is one of poetic and intuitive experimentation, as she allows found materials such as discarded clothing and other objects to be transformed into intricate abstract sculptures that evolve into organic installations.
Torção is a monumental hanging construction, assembled in radiantly colored textiles that form a complex, three-dimensional birdcage: an allusion to Brazil’s complicated history of racism, particularly the legacy of slavery and the ongoing struggle for racial justice. As with all her work, Torção draws from Gomes’ vast inventory of found, donated and gifted fabrics, domestic items and personal clothing. “There’s a relationship between t.mes and reflection—all the materials that I work with are an exercise in exploring the soul of these objects,” Gomes says. “It is closely linked to the history of other people.”
Works by Sônia Gomes in Major Institutional collects ions
Gomes has been vocal about the challenges of working in a predominantly white, male-dominated field and has often spoken about the need for greater representation and recognition of Black artists. Born in Caetanópolis, Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1948, she grew up in a working-class family and was exposed to traditional crafts at a young age. After studying at the Escola Guignard in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, she went on to have a successful career as a fashion designer before turning her attention to art-making in the 1980s. Gomes’ work gained recognition outside the country well before it started making waves in Brazil. In 2015, she was invited to participate in that year's Venice Biennale, and in 2017, her work was displayed at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. First solo shows at well-known Brazilian institutions quickly followed. In 2018, her work was featured at the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum and at the Museum of Art of São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where she was the first living Afro-Brazilian female artist to have a monographic show. Since then, she has been invited to participate in the 2018 Venice Biennale and the 2019 Sharjah Biennial.
