Mendes Wood DM São Paulo is pleased to present Sonia Gomes and Marga Ledora's duo exhibition at the gallery.

Sonia Gomes works with sculpture and installations made with different materials from varied backgrounds – such as clothes and furniture – playing with potential combinations between them. Her compositions stem from a spontaneous and casual practice of deconstruction and re-assemblage of the everyday objects that cross her path. The artworks are created in a process conducted with a rare intuition, giving life and proposing a new sense to things in the world.

Exploring recently new materials such as wood, Gomes studies the organicity of shapes in a new way, resulting in the Filhote series, small-scale sculptures of unidentified animal shapes. The gesture and form, always pillars of the artist's work, reveal the interior of bodies in construction, refer to vertebrae, cartilage and muscles. These animals built through the seam on the rigid shape of the roots and tree trunks reveals the necessity to shelter in the space and here begins the dialogue between the artists Sonia Gomes and Marga Ledora.

Ledora draws houses made from oily pastel on paper. Empty and full houses, floating in a non-place, ambivalent to the precise definitions of the drawing, in a malleable logic of simplicity. The shapes retract and unfold, as if the walls open and reveal mysterious interiors. The artist explores possibilities in the gesture just like Gomes, but resulting into the form of an empty space, provoking the boundaries between invisibility and non-existence.

The exhibition unites the unknown animals of Gomes with the empty houses of Ledora as a single work, a poetic and formal attempt to rehearse an invisible place for animals that do not exist. Both artists had the drawing as a point of reflection for their work as an artist. Gomes thought he could not be an artist for not use the traditional technique of drawing in her practice, Ledora finds in the study of materials on paper a way to explore the gesture and the form consequently. The union of the works for this duo exhibition is for the artists, beyond a trial of the practices, an occasion of reflection regarding the limits in the work of both.

Sonia Gomes (Caetanópolis, 1948) lives and works in São Paulo. In 2018, She held two monographic institutional exhibitions in Brazil, one at the MASP - Museum of Art in Sao Paulo and the other at the MAC - Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro. Her works were also included in institutional exhibitions such as the 56th Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy (2015); Entangled, Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (2017); Revival, The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, USA (2017); Art & Textiles - Fabric as Material and Concept in Modern Art, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2013); Out of Fashion. Textile in International Contemporary Art, Kunsten - Museum of Modern Art Aalborg, Denmark (2013).

Marga Ledora (São Paulo, 1959) lives and works in Campinas. Her works were part of the following exhibitions: Reinterpreting Large Images, Hilda Hilst Cultural Workshop, Campinas (2013); Galeria Gravura Brasileira, São Paulo (2012); Chronicles Photographic (2012); The Books, Alpharrabio, São Paulo (2011).