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Lot Essay
Born in Rio de Janeiro, Fernanda Gomes is one of the most interesting artists of her generation working in Brazil. her work relishes in the exquisiteness and poetic present in everyday "found" objects such as glass, small mirrors and magnets, string, hair, cigarette ends, and an array of mundane fragments of everyday life which she calls "things." Most recently, she participated in the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013 as well as the Sao Paulo Biennial in 2012 and the Rennes Biennial that same year. her works are represented in important institutional collections includign Tate Modern, London, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Gomes' Untitled sculptures of cigarette papers recalls Mira Schendel's Droguinhas--a slang term used to rfer to "nothing" or "something worthless" created in the mid-60s. Schendel's Droguinhas, composed of knotted rice paper that she would intertwine by hand, were exploration of existence and materiality. At the time, Schendel's Droguinhas presented a radical expression of absence and transience materialized into a sculpture. In the present work, Gomes furthers this exploration by creatign work that bears the weight of a personal relationship object and creator. Gomes' work reveals her penchant for the beauty in the ignored: "rejected things, too used or useless, orinsignificant, frequently are impregnated with some degree of our humanity. The state of things on their way to disappearing appeals to me: they have a strange density in contrast to their precarious materiality." (F. Gomes, quoted in interview with Ernesto neto for BOMB Magazine http: bombmagazine.org/article/3039/fernanda-gomes-and-ernesto-neto).
Gomes' Untitled sculptures of cigarette papers recalls Mira Schendel's Droguinhas--a slang term used to rfer to "nothing" or "something worthless" created in the mid-60s. Schendel's Droguinhas, composed of knotted rice paper that she would intertwine by hand, were exploration of existence and materiality. At the time, Schendel's Droguinhas presented a radical expression of absence and transience materialized into a sculpture. In the present work, Gomes furthers this exploration by creatign work that bears the weight of a personal relationship object and creator. Gomes' work reveals her penchant for the beauty in the ignored: "rejected things, too used or useless, orinsignificant, frequently are impregnated with some degree of our humanity. The state of things on their way to disappearing appeals to me: they have a strange density in contrast to their precarious materiality." (F. Gomes, quoted in interview with Ernesto neto for BOMB Magazine http: bombmagazine.org/article/3039/fernanda-gomes-and-ernesto-neto).