Sonia Gomes

Sonia Gomes was born in 1948 in Caetanopolis, a small textile-mill town in Minas Gerais, Brazil. She trained and worked as a lawyer into her mid-forties before giving up that career in the 1990s to devote herself to art, studying at Escola Guignard, part of the Universidade do Estado de Minas Gerais, from 1995 to 1997.

Her sculptures are built from cloth she collects from family members, friends, and her own community: scraps, ribbons, lace, and discarded garments, bound, knotted, and twisted around wire or wood armatures and often suspended from the ceiling. The work draws on Afro-Brazilian religious and cultural traditions, on the legacy of enslaved ancestors in her family, and on the physical labor of sewing and binding historically associated with women. Her first solo exhibition, O Ritmo da Linha, was held in 2011 at the Espaco Cultural do Forum Lafayette in Minas Gerais.

International recognition accelerated after her inclusion in All the World's Futures, curated by Okwui Enwezor for the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015. In 2018 she became the first living Afro-Brazilian woman to receive a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte de Sao Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), titled Still I Rise, which later traveled to the Museu de Arte Contemporanea de Niteroi. She has since shown at the 35th Sao Paulo Biennial (2023), Pace Gallery in New York (2022), and Storm King Art Center (2025). She continues to live and work in Sao Paulo.

Critical attention to Gomes has tracked her rapid institutional rise, from a relatively late-career debut to the 2015 Venice Biennale, the landmark 2018 MASP solo show, and inclusion in the 2024 Holy See Pavilion in Venice. Museums have echoed that momentum institutionally, with MoMA, the Guggenheim, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, and the National Gallery of Art all acquiring her work, and Perez Art Museum Miami mounting a multi-year installation of her sculptures.

Gomes's auction footprint is small but has grown sharply in value. Her recorded auction high is an untitled work from the series Torcao (2013), which sold for USD 138,600 against an estimate of USD 8,000 to 12,000 at Phillips New York on 3 March 2021, a result Phillips designated a world auction record for the artist. Her primary market is anchored by joint representation from Mendes Wood DM, her longtime Sao Paulo gallery, together with Blum & Poe and Pace Gallery, who began representing her internationally in 2020.

Gomes's museum and gallery momentum is strong, but her auction record remains sparse, with only a small number of public sales and a single confirmed high of USD 138,600 set in 2021. There is no catalogue raisonne, so provenance and verification run through her three representing galleries rather than a published scholarly record. Because each of her sculptures is a unique, hand-built object rather than part of an edition, direct comparables are limited, and collectors should treat any single auction result as a data point rather than a trend line.