Solange Pessoa - Longilonge

Solange Pessoa Longilonge
November 15, 2019–April 19, 2020

Opening reception: November 15, 6–9pm

Ballroom Marfa is proud to present the first solo museum exhibition in the United States of noted Brazilian artist Solange Pessoa. Pessoa has built a significant and internationally recognized body of work over three decades, which spans the mediums of painting, drawing, installation, sculpture, and video. The exhibition will include new commissions that respond to the cultural and natural landscape in West Texas, alongside important existing pieces made in Minas Gerais, Brazil, where the artist lives and works.

The title—Longilonge—refers to an invented word, found in the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Pessoa repurposes this word to evoke a distant space or time, a longing for the unreachable, a sort of mythical place for feelings and memories, a region of temporal textures.

Pessoa’s expressive and telluric art draws inspiration from myriad sources: nature, the Baroque, dreams and the unconscious, Tropicalia, prehistoric cave paintings and carved tools, Land Art, traditional craft, ancestry, Surrealism, and poetry. These and many other references lie under the surface of a fully developed lifework wrought from sustained material investigation, intuitive curiosity, and an acute command of gesture and form.

Altogether five distinct bodies of work will converge for the show at Ballroom—displaying touch-points in the arc of the artist’s career and creating a connective tissue of imagery, ideas, and relationships between two distant places in North and South America.

This exhibition is organized by Ballroom Marfa Director & Curator Laura Copelin.

Solange Pessoa (Ferros, 1961) lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Her selected solo exhibitions include Solange Pessoa, Mendes Wood DM, New York (2018); Solange Pessoa, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles (2017); Solange Pessoa, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2016); Metaflor-Metaflora, Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (2013); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2008); Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto (2000); Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte (1995); and Centro Cultural São Paulo, (1992).

Pessoa received a grant from the Pollock Krasner Foundation (1996/1997) and has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad including Invenção de Origem, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018); La Fin de Babylone, Koln Skulptur #9, Cologne (2017); New Shamans (2016), High Anxiety (2016), and No Man’s Land: Women Artists (2015), Rubell Family Collection, Miami, USA; Arte e Patrimônio, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2014); Mostra do Redescobrimento, CAPS Musée d'Art Contemporain, Bordeaux, France (2001); and Heranças Contemporâneas (1999), Encontros e Tendências (1993), Museu de Arte Contemporânea de São Paulo.