Review: Fernanda Gomes, Pinacoteca do Estado
Ela Bittencourt, Hyperallergic
January 2020
SÃO PAULO — It’s rare for austere white to feel intimate. And yet, the Brazilian sculptor Fernanda Gomes has for four decades created a body of work that is rigorously abstract, but also unexpectedly inviting. That intimacy often stems less from the individual pieces than from their arrangement — the way Gomes lays out her works in space.
The current show at the Pinacoteca do Estado, in São Paulo, which includes over 100 works and spans the 1980s to the present, is reflective of Gomes’s approach. Gomes, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, often works from home, where daily, mundane objects are not distinguished from sculptural pieces. Those pieces often mix plaster, wood, metal, and glass, as well as nails, string, paper, repurposed chairs, tables, and books. The exhibition, which Gomes spent three weeks installing in the museum space, alternates between rooms in which works are presented sparingly, and those in which they form conglomerates, with many pieces spread out on walls and floor. All of the works are unnamed, with no dates or chronological order. In this sense, the exhibition, which also doesn’t have a title, is a regrouping — a reimagining and restaging of Gomes’s oeuvre. […]