Solange Pessoa (b.1961)
Featured in 'Erasure' - Open from 22 November 2025
Solange Pessoa is one of Brazil’s most celebrated living artists who, since the 1980s, has created dreamlike installations, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, and paintings that explore human entanglement with the natural earth.
Over 30 of Pessoa’s ‘pedra-sabão’ or ‘soapstones’ will be arranged across the floors of The Gallery, echoing our present moment of species and cultural depletion. Reminiscent of runes or cave paintings, these sculptures speak of histories of extraction and colonial resource exploitation associated with the mining region where she grew up.
Artist
Winter Exhibition 2025
The organic world is always the spark for Pessoa, as well as her continuing research with dreams, mythologies and the workings of the subconscious. Her material-led approach sees organic matter such as seeds, earth, plants and stones from her family farm used in her practice, directly embedding both human and ecological memory into her work.
The presentation of Solange Pessoa’s work coincides with the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), taking place in November 2025 in the Amazonian city of Belém. As world leaders and activists gather to address the climate crisis, Pessoa’s work offers a different yet essential perspective - one that is rooted not in policy or data, but in a poetic, material dialogue with the earth.
About the artist
Solange Pessoa lives and works in Brazil. Beyond the clear references to organic life or prehistoric artistic experimentations, what stands out in Pessoa’s work is a singular, pulsating vitality, which manifests itself in peculiar contours that create figures in which we recognise the primordial movement of genesis.
Pessoa’s expansive practice draws inspiration from a plethora of sources: archaeology, prehistoric cave paintings, traditional craft, Brazilian Baroque and poetry. Her stylisation of life assumes a radical depth, offering a particular language for reading and imagining the world. Thus, we see species that carry traits from mineral, botanical, and animal realms and convey universality through their most regional aspects.
Artist
Winter Exhibition 2025
