Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil
A visual artist and poet, Lenora de Barros began her career in the 1970s. With a degree in Linguistics from the Universidade de São Paulo, her first works can be placed in the field of “visual poetry”, associated with the concrete poetry of the 1950s. In 1983, she published a book of poems called Onde Se Vê. Some of them dispensed with the use of words, being constructed as photographic sequences of performative acts. In the same year, she took part in the 17th Bienal de São Paulo with visual poems in videotext. Since then, Lenora has built a poetics marked by the use of various languages: video, performance, photography, sound installation and object construction.
In 1990 she moved to Milan, Italy, where she stayed for a year, holding her first solo exhibition, Poesia É Coisa de Nada, at the Galeria Mercato del Sale. In this show, Lenora inaugurates the Ping-Poems series by scattering five thousand ping-pong balls on the gallery floor with the phrase title printed on them. Between 1993 and 1996 she wrote an experimental column for Jornal da Tarde, in São Paulo, entitled ... umas. From the column emerged works and ideas that became autonomous videos and photo performances over the next years. In 2013, the 65 columns and 2 video performances were exhibited for the first time at Casa Laura Alvim, in Rio de Janeiro, and in 2014 they were presented at Pivô, in São Paulo.
In 2017, she took part in the exhibition Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985, curated by Cecilia Fajardo-Hill and Andrea Giunta at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and the Brooklyn Museum in New York (2018). The show went on to the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo in 2018. Her most important group and solo exhibitions include Lenora de Barros: To See Aloud, at the Badischer Kunstverein (Karlsruhe, Germany, 2025); Não Vejo a Hora [I Can't Wait], at Gomide&Co (São Paulo, 2023), her participation in the 59th Biennale di Venezia - The Milk of Dreams (Venice, 2022), Lenora de Barros: minha língua, at Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (2022), RETROMEMÓRIA, at Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM-SP (2022), Tools for Utopia: Selected works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection, at the Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, 2020), ISSOÉOSSODISSO, at the Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo, 2016), 4th Thessaloníki Biennial of Contemporary Art (Greece, 2013), 11th Lyon Biennial (France, 2011), as well as participation in the 17th, 24th and 30th editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1983, 1998 and 2012).
Her work is part of important collections in museums and institutions such as the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona - MACBA; the Daros Latinamerica Collection, in Zurich; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, in Madrid; the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo - MAM-SP; the Pinacoteca de São Paulo; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, in New York; the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo - MAC-USP, among others.
