Lucia Nogueira was born in Goiânia, Brazil, and developed her artistic career in London, where she lived from 1975 onward. Over the course of a brief yet remarkable trajectory, she built a singular and profoundly sensitive body of work encompassing sculpture, installation, drawing, and video. Her practice articulates the relationship between object and language, exploring the fragility of the human body and its presence in space.
Nogueira’s work focused primarily on sculpture and installation, through poetic compositions made with found, broken, or abandoned objects. These materials were subtly transformed by the artist, acquiring physical and psychological resonances. Her production is permeated by coexisting dualities—such as fear and desire, attraction and repulsion, order and chaos—which establish a field of tension and ambiguity between form and meaning.
Drawing played a fundamental role in her practice, functioning as an act of discovery and an extension of her three-dimensional research. In her early works, elongated, doubled, decapitated, or hidden figures predominate, while in later drawings recurring motifs of animals and everyday objects emerge, evoking both playfulness and unease.
Lucia Nogueira studied journalism and communications in Brasília and photography in Washington, D.C., before moving to the United Kingdom. She earned a degree in painting from Chelsea College of Art (1976–79) and the Central School of Art and Design (1979–80). She received a Fondation Cartier residency fellowship in Versailles (1993) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award (1996). In 2007, the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Fundação de Serralves in Porto organized a comprehensive retrospective dedicated to the artist. In 2018, her work was featured in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo.
Her works are held in major institutional collections, including Tate, London; Arts Council England; Leeds City Art Gallery; Henry Moore Foundation, UK; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona – MACBA; and the Art Institute of Chicago – AIC, among others.
