Lucia Nogueira presented in collaboration with Anthony Reynolds Gallery

Nogueira’s body of work comprises installation, sculpture, video and drawing. The material and psychological relationships in the interplay of objects, space and language is at the core of her artistic practice. Many of her works incorporate detritus found discarded on the streets of London, or acquired in army surplus, medical and second-hand shops. Nogueira had an extraordinary eye for the potential of the apparently least promising discovery and her ability to place objects in significant conversation with spaces was uncanny. A fascination with the structure of language infiltrated her titles but also expressed the particular force of her bilingual ambivalence.

Nogueira’s art eludes classification. Despite frequently suggesting a Brazilian sensibility, for example in the frequent use of dried black beans as capsules of energy, it does not sit comfortably within the paradigm of most Brazilian art, but neither does it reflect what was taking place in London at the time. It is suspended in a complex cultural partnership and expresses relationships that are at the root of our attempts to negotiate experience.

Nogueira’s work, despite her use of language, is not representational or narrative. On the contrary, it is concerned with the range of poetic and philosophical stimuli that can be generated by a single, precise point of connectivity.

Nogueira was born in 1950 in Goiânia, Central Brazil and studied Journalism and Communications in Brasilia and photography in Washington DC before visiting London in 1975. Planning to stay for just two weeks to see her brother, she ended up staying for the rest of her life. She studied painting first at Chelsea College of Art (1976–79) and then at the Central School of Art and Design (1979–80). Starting her professional career as a painter, her work was first exhibited in London at Riverside studios in 1984. Nogueira’s first solo exhibition was at the Carlile Gallery in Islington in 1988 (one work from that exhibition is included in the current exhibition). Major shows soon followed including at the Serpentine Gallery, London; Chisenhale Gallery, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; and Camden Arts Centre, London. She was the recipient of a Fondation Cartier residential fellowship at Versailles in 1993 and was a Paul Hamlyn Foundation award winner in 1996. A retrospective exhibition was staged at the Museu Serralves in Porto in 2007. Her work is in the collection of the Tate, The Arts Council, Leeds City Art Gallery, The Henry Moore Sculpture Trust, Museu Serralves and many other important UK and international collections.

This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London.