SONIA GOMES: É PRECISO NÃO TER MEDO DE CRIAR
PACE is pleased to announce É preciso não ter medo de criar, the first solo exhibition in the UK by São Paulo-based artist Sonia Gomes, on view at its gallery in London from October 14 to November 15.
October 14 – November 15, 2025
One of Brazil’s foremost contemporary artists, Gomes combines second-hand textiles with everyday materials such as birdcages, driftwood, and wire to create abstract sculptures that reclaim traditions rooted in Afro-diasporic experiences and craft modes of artmaking from the margins of history. In 2015, she was the only Brazilian artist invited by the late curator Okwui Enwezor to the Arsenale exhibition of the 56th Venice Biennale, and in 2018, she became the first living Black woman artist to receive a monographic exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP). Last year, in 2024, she returned to Venice, showing work as part of the Holy See Pavilion for the 60th Venice Biennale.
Born in 1948 in Caetanópolis, a former textile hub in Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil, Gomes has cultivated a singular practice anchored by her deft and meticulous manipulation of varied materials. Across these transformations, her approach remains rooted in gestures of care and reinforcement: sewing, tying, and wrapping.
The exhibition’s title—translated as “one must not be afraid to create”—is drawn from Clarice Lispector’s 1943 novel Near to the Wild Heart and has guided Gomes’s embrace of new materials and techniques for this show. In addition to her ongoing experimentation with found and gifted fabrics, Gomes has created bronze sculptures for the first time. These forms—casts of textile-wrapped tree burls and branches—extend the artist’s visual language, highlighting the tension between vulnerable materials and elevated finishes. This relationship recurs in a new group of wall-mounted works made from reclaimed lumber, transformed by the artist with gold leaf and fragments of a 19th-century liturgical vestment. Rectangular in form, they bring together weathered wood and gilded surface, continuing Gomes’s engagement with contrast and transformation.
A major new work included in the show, titled Tereza (2025), fuses a group of Gomes’s previously unrealized pendant works into one commanding form. Suspended from the ceiling and meandering through the exhibition space, this sculpture holds a vital, organic quality. In Brazilian Portuguese prison slang, tereza refers to the makeshift ropes used in escape attempts that are often fashioned from tied-together bedsheets and other fabrics. Gomes’s hanging works, such as this one, embody the word’s liberatory implications, allowing their textile remnants—carriers of collective and individual memory—to slip free from oblivion.
The artist’s Torção (torsion) sculptures, two of which feature in the exhibition, emerge from a single line. To create these, Gomes engages her whole body in describing the sculpture’s composition with uncoiled construction wire and steel reinforcing bars for the base. Choosing from her extensive trove of fabrics, Gomes forms the sculpture’s body by wrapping, twisting, tying, weaving, and stitching scraps of these materials around and through its skeleton. In her studio, she separates handcrafted textiles—such as laces, embroideries, and knits—from industrially made materials, treating the former as compositional tools and the latter as a color palette. In a new wall-based Torção included in the exhibition, Gomes has explored an unprecedented level of openness in her composition: for the first time leaving one extreme of the spiral-wire structure hanging freely in the air.