[open the box] Valeska Soares

The work of the Brazilian artist Valeska Soares, who has lived in New York City since 1992, is constructed between the subjectivity of memory and the strictest formality of sculpture. Countless categories of objects found and brought together over the years can be a part of her installations (wooden boxes, stools and chairs, sweet wrappers), but they may also include formally sculpted objects, often with great rigour, in a permanent flirtation with beauty and narcissism, as takes place in the several installations in which she uses mirrors and in which the spectator is reflected.

Valeska Soares’s installations are situations, proposals for wanderings by the spectator in which the domestic character of the objects is raised as a monument, due both to the scale of the repetition, and for the way that, when together, they possess an echo of grandiosity that makes them come out of the subjective scale to move into the epic dimension.

Between the little memory and great recollection, between the fragility of the indication and the monumentality of the scale, Valeska Soares touches a nerve in the gash that beats in the limbo between the banality of everyday life and the exceptional nature of art.

Biography
Valeska Soares was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in 1957. She lives and works in New York, where, after training in Architecture and History of Art in Rio de Janeiro, she studied at the Pratt Institute, taking her PhD in Arts at New York University. She has used several different disciplines, from three-dimensional objects to videos and installations. She regularly exhibits in galleries and museums, such as The Bronx Museum of the Arts (New York, 2003- 2004), Martin-Gropius-Bau (Berlin, 2004), The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2007) and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo (2008). She participated at the Johannesburg Biennial (1997), Liverpool Biennial (2004), São Paulo Biennial (1994 and 2008), Taipei Biennial (2006), Venice Biennial (2006) and Sharjah Biennial (2009). Her works are included in several collections, such as the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (Santiago de Compostela) and the Tate Collection (United Kingdom).

Bibliography
Virgin territory: women, gender, and history in contemporary Brazilian art (cat.), Washington DC, National Museum of Women in the Arts, 2001.
Seduções: Valeska Soares, Cildo Meireles, Ernesto Neto. Installations (cat.), Zurich, Hatje Cantz, 2006.