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Bio Summary

Valeska Soares - Artists - Alexander Gray Associates

Valeska Soares, 2018. Photo: Ross Collab.

Valeska Soares (b.1957) was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and from a young age, she was exposed to references from a variety of cultural milieus, including poetry, literature, film, psychology, and mythology. She studied architecture at Universidade Santa Úrsula, Rio de Janeiro; this training reinforced an interest in site specificity, with artworks that consider both contextual history and spatial constructs. The Brazilian art scene in the late-1980s and early 1990s catalyzed Soares’s artistic career in Rio and São Paulo, and in 1992, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, continuing her artistic education and career. From New York, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, her work has been positioned in multiple platforms, reinforcing the globalized art world’s questions of geography, cultural and national identity, discipline, and form.

Biography

Valeska Soares (b.1957) was born in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and from a young age, she was exposed to references from a variety of cultural milieus, including poetry, literature, film, psychology, and mythology. She studied architecture at Universidade Santa Úrsula, Rio de Janiero; this training reinforced an interest in site specificity, with artworks that consider both contextual history and spatial constructs. The Brazilian art scene in the late 1980s and early 1990s catalyzed Soares’s artistic career in Rio and São Paulo, and in 1992, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, continuing her artistic education and career. From New York, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, her work has been positioned in multiple platforms, reinforcing the globalized art world’s questions of geography, cultural and national identity, discipline, and form.

Soares’s bodies of work are linked thematically, but deploy diverse strategies to address issues and concerns through materials, forms, and experiences. Utilizing tools of minimalism and conceptualism, her work embraces emotion and humanity, mining territories of love, intimacy, and desire; loss and longing; and memory and language. She has explored these elusive themes through a myriad of tactics, infusing objects such as mirrors, clocks, glass, books, furniture, and flora with poetics, narratives, and alchemy. The resulting artworks—paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and audio experiences—morph the physical and the psychological, the body and the mind. In Soares’s refined visual language, reflective objects suggest reflective thinking, concealed images reveal unexpected mysteries, and accumulated words disintegrate linear narrative.

Desire is a central theme in Soares’s practice, enticing viewers though an engagement with all five senses. Her installations have included perfume, decaying flowers, or spirits; these works result in phenomenological experiences that shift perception and expectations. In her words, “desire is like a vanishing point: every time you go towards it, it recedes a little.” Another motif in her work is the transference of personal memory and collective history; the artist frequently re-purposes second hand objects that she considers charged by “the lives and memories [of former owners], becoming for a moment in time, part of those personal narratives as each one travels from subject to subject.” Canvases made of 

book covers convene and re-orient individual narratives; collections of empty antique cake platters or half-filled drinking glasses suggest rituals or celebrations that have been suspended in time. Soares’s art encourages the widest possible viewer experience, rejecting the idea of a singular reading or message. Describing this interest in unrestricted opportunities for engagement, she states, “what interests me is the surprise in how each person is going to perceive the piece. And even the same person, on different days—depending on the sun and the moon, a dream they had, how they woke up—the work is never the same.”

Soares’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions presented at The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil (2018); Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA (2017); Phoenix Art Museum, AZ (2017); Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2017); The Jewish Museum, New York (2015); Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Mexico (2003); Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City (2002); Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla, CA (1999); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY (1995), among others. Soares has participated in numerous international exhibitions including the Lyon Bienniale (2022); two Venice Biennales (2011, 2005); several São Paulo Biennials (2009, 1998, 1994); the Sharjah Biennial (2009); the Taipei Biennial (2006); the Liverpool Biennial (2004); inSITE San Diego/Tijuana (2000–01); and the Havana Biennial (1991). Soares’s work is the permanent collections of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Museum d’Art Contemporary de Barcelona, Spain; Minneapolis Institute of Art, MN; Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, NY; Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Museu de Arte Contemporânea–MAC in São Paulo, Brazil; and Museu de Arte Moderna–MAM, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and others. Soares has been the recipient of many grants and awards, including the Coordenao de Aperfeioamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) fellowship, Brazil’s Ministry of Education; Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, The Getty Foundation, Los Angeles; Anonymous Was a Woman Award, New York; and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, New York. 

Valeska Soares is also represented by Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel in São Paulo, Brazil.

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Public Collections

American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, D.C.
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas, Austin, TX
The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Bronx, NY
Buffalo AKG Art Museum, NY
Burger Collection, Zürich, Switzerland
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburg, PA
Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain
Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, Miami, FL
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX
Daros Foundation, Zürich, Switzerland
Fundação Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil
Fundación “la Caixa,” Barcelona, Spain
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.
Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil
JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY
Laumeier Sculpture Park, Saint Louis, MO
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
MINT Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain
Museu Arte de Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain
Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil
Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil
Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil
Museu Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporâneo, Badajoz, Spain
Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA
National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil
Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield Village, OH
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, CA
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY
Tate, London, United Kingdom