PRESENTATION: Sonia Gomes-É preciso não ter medo de criar

Sonia Gomes transforms secondhand textiles and everyday materials—like furniture, driftwood, and wire—into abstract sculptures that reclaim Afro-Brazilian traditions and overlooked crafts. Mixing taut and slack forms inspired by Brazilian dance, her works pulse with movement and bodily presence. Using found or gifted fabrics that “carry the history of their owners,” Gomes gives them new meaning, weaving Brazil’s past with the forgotten stories of women, people of color, and the anonymous.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “É preciso não ter medo de criar” (“One must not be afraid to create”) unveils a body of entirely new works by Sonia Gomes, including her celebrated pendants and Torção sculptures, alongside a bold new series of paintings and her first explorations in bronze. Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, a former textile hub in Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, Gomes has forged a singular practice rooted in the tactile intelligence of craft and the poetic potential of transformation. Her art begins in gestures of care—sewing, tying, wrapping—actions that both mend and reimagine the materials she gathers. Through this delicate choreography of touch and reinvention, Gomes’s works embody resilience, intimacy, and the persistence of memory. The exhibition’s title is drawn from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel “Near to the Wild Heart”, a text that, like Gomes’s own practice, celebrates instinct and intuition as sources of creation. Guided by this spirit of fearless experimentation, Gomes expands her vocabulary here with bronze sculptures—a medium she approaches for the first time. Cast from textile-wrapped burls and branches, these new forms translate the softness and vulnerability of fabric into the endurance of metal. The result is a tension between fragility and permanence, echoing the artist’s enduring fascination with metamorphosis. This duality also animates a new group of wall-mounted works assembled from reclaimed lumber. Transformed through the application of gold leaf and fragments of 19th-century liturgical vestments, these rectangular compositions fuse the humble and the sacred. Weathered wood meets gilded surface, as Gomes continues to probe the meeting point between material histories and spiritual renewal. At the heart of the exhibition stands a major new sculpture, “Tereza” (2025), in which Gomes unites a constellation of her previously unrealized pendant works into a single, sweeping composition that winds through the gallery space. The title invokes “tereza”, a term from Brazilian prison slang describing makeshift ropes—often braided from bedsheets—used in escape attempts. In Gomes’s hands, the word becomes a metaphor for liberation and survival: her suspended forms, composed of intertwined textiles gifted or found, extend toward freedom, carrying the weight of collective and personal histories. Two of Gomes’s signature “Torção” (Torsion) sculptures also feature prominently. Emerging from a single, continuous line, these works are composed through full-body movement, as the artist shapes uncoiled construction wire and steel rods into gestural frameworks. Around these armatures, she winds and stitches an array of fabrics—handmade laces and embroideries mingling with industrial textiles—transforming remnants into living surfaces. In a new wall-based Torção, Gomes introduces an unprecedented openness to her composition, allowing one end of the spiral to float freely in space for the first time, as if inhaling air. The exhibition also presents recent works from her “Raio de Sol” (Sunbeam) series and a new suite of paintings in which organic, luminous forms emerge through layers of watercolor, acrylic, Posca pen, thread, beads, and oil. These fluid gestures evoke spiral and circular motifs, long central to Gomes’s visual language and to cyclical conceptions of time, growth, and return. Three newly created works—“Cru” (Raw), “Um sopro de vida” (A Breath of Life), and “Peleja” (Tussle), all 2025—introduce another chapter in Gomes’s dialogue with material and memory. Each incorporates shibori-dyed, hand-stitched cotton crafted by Bai artisans near the Tibetan border in China, fabrics the artist discovered in a London market in 2019. Captivated by their sculptural volumes and the traces of interrupted labor, Gomes reactivates these unfinished textiles within her own compositions. Through her intervention, they collapse temporal and cultural distances—joining past and present, individual gesture and collective heritage—into a single act of poetic renewal.

Photo: Sonia Gomes, Vôo, 2014 Moorings and different fabrics on wire, 100 x 100 x 60 cm, © Sonia Gomes, Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery

Info: Curator: Paulo Miyada, Pace Gallery, 5 Hanover Square, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 14/10-15/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00,  www.pacegallery.com/