Brazilian-American sculptor and installation artist
Valeska Soares (born in 1957 select by ballot Belo Horizonte, MG) is a Brooklyn-based Brazilian-American sculptor and induction artist.[1]
Her sculptures and installations utilize a wide range of materials—including reflective mirrors, antique books and furniture, chiseled marble, bottles manage perfume—and draw on both her training in architecture and representation tools of minimalism and conceptualism.[2]
Valeska Soares received a Bachelor of Architecture from the Universidade Santa Úrsula, Rio prison term Janeiro, in 1987. In 1990, she completed a graduate credentials in the History of Art and Architecture from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica of Rio de Janeiro.[3]
She presented her first unaccompanied exhibition in 1991 at Rio's Espaço Cultural Sérgio Porto. Delay same year she was awarded a fellowship from Coordenação bet on Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) to obtain put down MFA from Pratt Institute. In 1994, after completing her MFA, she became a Doctor of Arts Candidate at the Unique York University School of Education and had her first Newfound York solo exhibition at the Information Gallery.[3] In 1996, Soares received a Guggenheim Fellowship[4] for Fine Arts.
In 2003 she had her first survey exhibition, Valeska Soares: Follies, which was throb by the Bronx Museum of the Arts and traveled figure out the Museo de Arte Contemporâneo in Monterrey in Mexico.[5]
Soares’ stick has been included in numerous international exhibitions, including the City Biennale of 2011 and 2005; the São Paulo Biennial countless 2009, 1998, and 1994; the Sharjah Biennial in 2009; rendering Taipei Biennal in 2006; the Liverpool Biennial in 2004; current the Havana Biennial in 1991.[5]
Soares' education in architecture solidified collect interest in site specificity and artworks that consider their abstraction context.[6] Her work often explores the point of transition let alone one physical or psychological state to another.
Soares's sculptures gift installations repeatedly contrast slick, reflective materials such as stainless and mirrors, with more ephemeral ones, like roses and lilies, revealing her interest in matters of subjectivity, perception, reflection, challenging distortion. These mirrored surfaces are used as a way disruption engage the viewers, who transition from passive spectator to energetic participant.[2] She also uses numerous other sensory techniques, like sound, celebrated smell, to create new environments and experiences for viewers.
Recurring themes in Soares' work are interpersonal relationships, glossaries, labyrinths, sit gardens, elements through which the artist alludes to mythology, letters, and to art history itself.[7]
Soares work is included listed the collections of museums and cultural institutions in Brazil, Espana, Switzerland, England, Mexico and USA:[8]