Lucia Nogueira

About

Nogueira was an artist of Brazilian heritage who relocated to London in 1975 staying until her untimely death in 1998.

Nogueira’s body of work comprises installation, sculpture, video and drawing. The material and psychological relationships in the interplay of objects, space and language is at the core of her artistic practice.  Many of her works incorporate detritus found discarded on the streets of London, or acquired in army surplus, medical and second-hand shops.  Nogueira had an extraordinary eye for the potential of the apparently least promising discovery and her ability to place objects in significant conversation with spaces was uncanny.  A fascination with the structure of language infiltrated her titles but also expressed the particular force of her bilingual ambivalence.

Nogueira’s art eludes classification.  Despite frequently suggesting a Brazilian sensibility, for example in the frequent use of dried black beans as capsules of energy, it does not sit comfortably within the paradigm of most Brazilian art, but neither does it reflect what was taking place in London at the time.  It is suspended in a complex cultural partnership and expresses relationships that are at the root of our attempts to negotiate experience.  Nogueira’s work, despite her use of language, is not representational or narrative.  On the contrary, it is concerned with the range of poetic and philosophical stimuli that can be generated by a single, precise point of connectivity.