Laura Lima is a philosophy graduate of The State University of Rio de Janeiro and a former student of the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage. Her work has been shown in several exhibitions, including the 24th and 27th São Paulo Biennale, the 2nd and 3rd Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, Brazil. The artist was first to sell a performance piece to the Modern Art Museum of São Paulo and won the Marcantônio Vilaça Prize in 2006. Together with artists Ernesto Neto and Marcio Botner, Lima founded the gallery A Gentil Carioca,in Rio de Janeiro.  
 

Laura Lima’s work takes the form of performance, drawing, installation and intervention. She structures her practice around a personal glossary where her ideas are named and organized in what she calls Instancias; different categories of thinking and making poetic images.

In the mid-nineties Lima initiated one of her best known series Man=flesh/Woman=flesh. By assigning people a variety of tasks and by constructing special apparatus for the situation, she created poetic live tableaux. For example, a man attached to trees by long threads on top of a mountain was asked to pull the landscape into the gallery. Another Instancia consisted of a costume shop, where the public was invited to engage with costumes produced by the artist, trying them on or modifying them. In another project live chickens were decorated with ornaments and colorful feathers.

Often presented in relation to the natural world, the idea of beauty and ornament is central to the artist’s practice. Conscious that this idea has been pushed aside by the avant-garde in the last century, she investigates it from an art historical point of view as well as from an existentialist angle: is it possible for us to exist without embellishing or ornamenting our world?

At La Centrale, Lima will present Ornamental Philosophy, an exploration of the action and circumstances of ornamentation. The exhibition is composed of geometric masks constructed in order to invite the public to adorn them as they wish.