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Lais Myrrha

1974, Belo Horizonte, Brazil
Lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil

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about

Lais Myrrha’s work addresses the instruments that mediate the occupation of space and legitimize official narratives. Through installation, sculpture, objects, video, and other media, the artist highlights the relationship between physical and symbolic place, emphasizing the arbitrary character and power discourses in conventions and systems of representation. Fundamentally, her works are distributed in four areas, which often intersect: Atlas, Zone of Instability, Case Studies, and Chronicles.

The first comprises a series of works with maps, measuring instruments, dictionaries, almanacs, and books in which the artist interferes, making visible and, therefore, denaturalizing methods and systems of representation, as well as their parameters and landmarks. The Zone of Instability is made up of works in which permanence and balance seem flawed and/or precarious. Case Studies highlight elements of architecture and modernism, mainly through the images produced by architecture, which operate as a projective machine of phantasmagoria and power. Finally, the Chronicles are visual and textual comments on ordinary events observed by the artist, either through the daily displacement in the city where she lives or through the news.

Myrrha is currently a PHD candidate and holds a MFA from the Escola de Belas-Artes at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. Among her noteworthy solo shows are Fundamentos da Pedra, at Millan, in 2023; O condensador de futuros, Pinacoteca de São Paulo, in 2021; Infinite Column, Blanton Museum, Austin, USA, 2017; Reparation of Damages, Broadway 1602, New York, USA, in 2017; Corpo de Prova, Sesc Bom Retiro, São Paulo, also in 2017; Projeto Gameleira 1971, Pivô, São Paulo, 2014; and Border Game, Galeria Millan, in 2009.

Among her group exhibitions, the following stand out: 37th Panorama de Arte Brasileira: Sob as cinzas, brasa, at the MAM, São Paulo, in 2022; 13th Bienal de La Habana, Cuba, in 2019; 12th Gwangju Biennial, South Korea, in 2018; 32nd Bienal de São Paulo, 2016, and Avenida Paulista, at the MASP, São Paulo, in 2017.

Myrrha was awarded the Prêmio Honra ao Mérito Arte e Patrimônio, Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, 2013; Bolsa Funarte de Estímulo à Produção em Artes Visuais, FUNARTE, Rio de Janeiro, 2012; and Bolsa Pampulha do Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte, 2003. Her works are featured in the collections of the Blanton Museum of Art: The University of Texas, Austin, USA; Fundação de Serralves, Porto, Portugal; MAR—Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; and Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil.

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