After 30 years in New York, artist Valeska Soares made the decision last year to leave her adopted home and return to São Paulo, the city of her youth. The reasoning behind the move was nuanced. Her mother, an accomplished artist herself, was now in her 90s, and the pandemic had heightened a desire for proximity to her family. Plus, living and working in a brownstone split into her studio and home for decades, Soares felt for the first time that perhaps she was getting a bit too comfortable.
The artist, whose works poetically engage minimalist and conceptualist strategies to investigate memory, emotion, and loss, began the task of moving decades-worth of her work and life.
Moving even a few blocks can be a trying undertaking; Soares’s move was of colossal scope, with shipping containers filled with her paints, archives, works in progress. Even amid the move, Soares continued working. In January of this year, she opened the exhibition “Broken Year” at New York’s Alexander Gray Associates, which explored the passage of time during the pandemic.
Amid the studio upheaval, we caught up with Soares in São Paulo, as she was awaiting approval of her studio renovations and preparing work for the upcoming Lyon Biennale.
You recently moved from New York to Saō Paolo. What has that process been like for your studio?
I’m still adapting. Usually, I do research in the studio and when I have a bigger project, like a sculpture, I do that outside the studio. Right now I’m living amid boxes. I’m renovating the studio. I’ve never lived in a building with a board before—so I didn’t know anything about that process of what they let you do, what they don’t let you do. I think they’re probably freaking out about me a little bit.
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Read full interview at news.artnet.com.
