Sonia Gomes, Barroco, mesmo, 2025, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, installation view
2026. Sonia Gomes
The history of Minas Gerais, the Brazilian state where Sonia Gomes was born in 1948, is indelibly marked by the extreme violence inflicted on enslaved Afro-diasporic populations and by the gold rush that began in the late seventeenth century. This terrain, where acute suffering and colonial opulence coexisted with almost obscene proximity—in a region from which more than a thousand tons of gold have been extracted since the colonial period—also generated significant forms of Black resistance. The eighteenth-century Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of the Black Men in Ouro Preto, for instance, with its sinuous elliptical plan and lavish gilded altarpieces, erected by the Black community itself, functioned as the site for a network of mutual aid, manumission funds, dignified funerary rites, and the preservation of African cultural practices.
Brazil’s history is inseparable from its inhabitants’ individual biographies, just as the emergence of the Baroque in Brazil is inconceivable without a Black presence. This exhibition, “Barroco, mesmo” (Baroque, Even), gestured toward a certain universality embedded in Brazil’s mestizo history while safeguarding the singularity and subjectivity of Gomes, whose work oscillates between macrocosmic and intimate registers. In Assombrar o mundo com beleza (capa do livro) (I Haunt the World with Beauty [Book Cover]), 1990s–2024, a black-and-white ID photograph of the artist as a young woman is affixed to a fabric flower encircled by delicate lace, forming a pendant-like medallion at the sculpture’s center, its contour defined by cords resembling a necklace. It is one of several works by Gomes that evoke joias de crioula, gold and silver adornments crafted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by enslaved and freed Black women as gestures of self-affirmation and power.
For Gomes, colonial dynamics are not topics of detached analysis but forces that permeate her own existence. Espiral (Spiral), 2021, is a long, suspended sculpture composed of heterogeneous textiles knotted and stitched together with costume jewelry, beads, sequins, knitting, lace, and crochet, whose forms resemble exposed viscera. Her work reiterates intricate, pulsating models for understanding the self and the world—structures in which astonishment coexists with dread, violence with care, estrangement with fascination. The Baroque emerges here as a perpetually mobile phenomenon, twisting and braiding the fictive straight line of time to reveal interconnections between African traditions, the colonial period shaped by the diaspora, and their reverberations in the present. The title of Tempo espiralar 2 (série Torção) (Spiral Time 2 [Torsion Series]), 2025, a sculpture that erupts from the wall in sinuous forms—with multicolored fabrics enveloping twisted wire—directly invokes a concept formulated by Brazilian writer Leda Maria Martins. The tension between the hardness of metal and the filigreed softness of textiles reflects an Afro-diasporic conception of temporality in which past, present, and future coil and return in continuous motion, making ritual, memory, performance, and bodily movement sites of living reactivation.
The sinuous translucent curtains that partitioned the exhibition space exemplified the artist’s predilection for curvature. Made of white voile in stark contrast to the deep red enveloping the gallery’s perimeter, these membranes had semicircular incisions that opened like moons, sometimes with the cut edge partially sutured back into place, sometimes with loose threads resembling webs emerging from them. Such gestures—meticulously calibrated, positioned at exact heights and scales in dialogue with the works—underscored the complex geometry and spatial command that have established Gomes as one of the most formidable sculptors of her generation. One crescent-shaped opening was placed beside the undated Gaiola de pérolas (série Gaiola) (Pearl Cage [Cage Series]), both dramatically spotlighted so that the architecture itself assumed a nocturnal, lunar atmosphere. Suspended from the ceiling, the small sculpture—a delicate birdcage with gilded bars entwined with textiles and cowrie shells that appear to root and blossom within its structure—glowed with a quiet, improbable preciousness.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 9, May 2026
Brazil’s history is inseparable from its inhabitants’ individual biographies, just as the emergence of the Baroque in Brazil is inconceivable without a Black presence. This exhibition, “Barroco, mesmo” (Baroque, Even), gestured toward a certain universality embedded in Brazil’s mestizo history while safeguarding the singularity and subjectivity of Gomes, whose work oscillates between macrocosmic and intimate registers. In Assombrar o mundo com beleza (capa do livro) (I Haunt the World with Beauty [Book Cover]), 1990s–2024, a black-and-white ID photograph of the artist as a young woman is affixed to a fabric flower encircled by delicate lace, forming a pendant-like medallion at the sculpture’s center, its contour defined by cords resembling a necklace. It is one of several works by Gomes that evoke joias de crioula, gold and silver adornments crafted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by enslaved and freed Black women as gestures of self-affirmation and power.
For Gomes, colonial dynamics are not topics of detached analysis but forces that permeate her own existence. Espiral (Spiral), 2021, is a long, suspended sculpture composed of heterogeneous textiles knotted and stitched together with costume jewelry, beads, sequins, knitting, lace, and crochet, whose forms resemble exposed viscera. Her work reiterates intricate, pulsating models for understanding the self and the world—structures in which astonishment coexists with dread, violence with care, estrangement with fascination. The Baroque emerges here as a perpetually mobile phenomenon, twisting and braiding the fictive straight line of time to reveal interconnections between African traditions, the colonial period shaped by the diaspora, and their reverberations in the present. The title of Tempo espiralar 2 (série Torção) (Spiral Time 2 [Torsion Series]), 2025, a sculpture that erupts from the wall in sinuous forms—with multicolored fabrics enveloping twisted wire—directly invokes a concept formulated by Brazilian writer Leda Maria Martins. The tension between the hardness of metal and the filigreed softness of textiles reflects an Afro-diasporic conception of temporality in which past, present, and future coil and return in continuous motion, making ritual, memory, performance, and bodily movement sites of living reactivation.
The sinuous translucent curtains that partitioned the exhibition space exemplified the artist’s predilection for curvature. Made of white voile in stark contrast to the deep red enveloping the gallery’s perimeter, these membranes had semicircular incisions that opened like moons, sometimes with the cut edge partially sutured back into place, sometimes with loose threads resembling webs emerging from them. Such gestures—meticulously calibrated, positioned at exact heights and scales in dialogue with the works—underscored the complex geometry and spatial command that have established Gomes as one of the most formidable sculptors of her generation. One crescent-shaped opening was placed beside the undated Gaiola de pérolas (série Gaiola) (Pearl Cage [Cage Series]), both dramatically spotlighted so that the architecture itself assumed a nocturnal, lunar atmosphere. Suspended from the ceiling, the small sculpture—a delicate birdcage with gilded bars entwined with textiles and cowrie shells that appear to root and blossom within its structure—glowed with a quiet, improbable preciousness.
Text originally published in Artforum, vol. 64, no. 9, May 2026
Sonia Gomes, Barroco, mesmo, 2025, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, installation views