Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil
Visual artist and poet, Lenora de Barros began her career in the 1970s. With a degree in Linguistics from USP – Universidade de São Paulo [University of 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 the book Onde Se Vê [Where One Sees], a collection of rather unusual poems. Some of them did not require the use of words, being constructed as photographic sequences of performative acts. In the same year, she participated in the 17th Bienal de São Paulo with visual poems in video texts. Since then, Lenora has built a poetics marked by the use of several 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 [Poetry Is Almost Nothing], at the Mercato del Sale Gallery. 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 [... some]. 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 participated 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 major group and solo exhibitions include the 59th Venice Biennale – The Milk of Dreams (Venice, 2022), RETROMEMÓRIA, at MAM-SP – Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo [Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo] (2022), Tools for Utopia: Selected works from the Daros Latinamerica Collection, at Kunstmuseum Bern (Bern, 2020), ISSOÉOSSODISSO, at Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade (São Paulo, 2016), 4th Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art (Greece, 2013), 11th Lyon Biennale (France, 2011), as well as participating 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 Brazil and in several countries, including the Hammer Museum (CA, USA), MACBA – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Barcelona (Spain), Daros Latinamerica Collection (Switzerland), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Spain), MAM-SP and Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo.