Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1950 Goiania, Brazil

Died: 1998 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1975

Other name/s: Lúcia Nogueira

Biography

Artist Lucia Nogueira was born in Goiania, Brazil on 22 February 1950. She studied Journalism and Communications at university in Brasília, before pursuing photography in Washington, D.C. In 1975, during a visit to London to see her brother, she decided to remain in the city permanently. She soon enrolled at Chelsea College of Art, studying painting from 1976–79, and continued her art education at the Central School of Art and Design until 1980.

Nogueira’s early practice was rooted in figurative painting and drawing, with expressive, sometimes dark, watercolours depicting elongated, fragmented, or doubled bodies. She gradually shifted towards sculpture and installation, disciplines where she would leave her most enduring mark. Throughout her career, she embraced a multidisciplinary approach, creating sculptures, installations, drawings, and video works that explored the relationships between object, space, and language. Central to her practice was the use of found, broken, or discarded materials, often scavenged from London’s streets or sourced from army surplus and second-hand shops. She had an uncanny ability to recognise the poetic potential in the least promising objects, recontextualising them to create psychologically charged works that hovered between violence and vulnerability, beauty and decay. Her installations and sculptures often suggested a quiet human presence, a fleeting trace of life that had just passed. Viewers were drawn into experiences where objects conversed across gaps of space, material, and meaning. Themes of instability, tension, and transformation were constant in Nogueira’s work. Pieces such as Untitled (1988) and Full Stop (1993) challenged the viewer’s sense of balance and security, creating spaces charged with latent energy and the possibility of sudden change. In her 1990 installation at London's Chisenhale Gallery, titled Smoke, she set massive gas pipes into the concrete floor opposite tiny mercury tilt switches, inviting viewers to imagine a contained yet explosive tension. Her works often required active negotiation, evoking feelings of wariness, curiosity, and heightened alertness.

Drawing, too, was integral to Nogueira’s practice. Far more than preparatory sketches, her drawings were vivid explorations in their own right. Early figurative works, such as Twelve Stations of the Cross (1983), depict distorted bodies and suggest a corporeal fragility that parallels her sculptural concerns. Later drawings introduced motifs such as animals, everyday objects, and abstract forms that played with notions of familiarity and strangeness. Using delicate watercolours and sharp graphite lines, she created visual worlds that shifted between whimsy and menace, echoing the psychological complexity of her three-dimensional work.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Nogueira gained recognition for her unique approach. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Barbara Carlile Gallery in north London in 1988, followed by major shows at venues including the Serpentine Gallery, Ikon Gallery, and Camden Arts Centre. She participated in significant group exhibitions such as Promises, Promises at the Serpentine Gallery (1989), The British Art Show 4 (1995), and Material Culture at the Hayward Gallery (1997). Her exhibitions frequently showcased her ability to transform gallery spaces into arenas of intense, if understated, drama.

Nogueira’s Brazilian heritage and experience as an immigrant in London deeply informed her work. Her sensitivity to the nuances of language—its gaps, ambiguities, and ironies—shaped both her titles and her approach to materials. Many works bear names referencing punctuation, idiomatic expressions, or linguistic oddities, reflecting her fascination with the slipperiness of meaning. As an outsider, she remained attuned to overlooked details of daily life, an alertness that translated into her installations and sculptures. As she put it, ‘the permanent dichotomy expressed in the cultural divisions of my background is clear in the location of most of my work at the borderline between one condition and another’ (quoted in Anthony Reynolds, 2016). Although comparisons have been drawn between her work and movements such as Arte Povera, or contemporaries like Rachel Whiteread and Richard Deacon, Nogueira’s art resisted easy categorisation. As João Fernandes observed, her work is ‘unique in the way in which it transforms the objects that it uses and relocates, in the sensorial situations with which it challenges the viewer’s perceptive intelligence, in the intimate violence it manifests, […] in the glorious creative hesitation with which it faces its conflicts and doubts’ (Annely Juda exhibition catalogue). Her work occupied a distinctive space between Brazilian and British traditions, rooted not in a single aesthetic but in the emotional and psychological resonance of her materials and spaces. Her ability to evoke complex human experiences—desire, fear, connection, and alienation—through minimal gestures remains one of her most striking achievements.

Nogueira died in London, England on 20 June 1998. A major retrospective was held at the Fundação de Serralves: Museu de Arte Contemporânea in Porto in 2007. In England, exhibitions were held at The Drawing Room, London (2005), Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2011), Annely Juda (2016), and Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2019). In the UK public domain, her work is represented in the Arts Council Collection, Tate, and Leeds Art Gallery, among others.

Related books

Lucia Nogueira (New York: Luhring Augustine, 2020)
Lucia Nogueira (London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 2016)
Pamela Kember, Lucia Nogueira Third Text, Vol. 25, 2011, p. 348
Maria Burmester, Joao Fernandes and Adrian Searle, Lucia Nogueira (Porto: Museu Serralves, 2007)
Lucia Nogueira Drawings (London: The Drawing Room, 2005)
Here & Now (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1995)
Lucia Nogueira, Elizabeth A. Macgregor and Andrew Wilson, Lucia Nogueira: New Work (Birmingham: Ikon Gallery, 1993)
Lucia Nogueira and Adrian Searle, Lucia Nogueira (London: Chisenhale Gallery, 1990)
Adrian Searle, Promises Promises (London: Serpentine Gallery, 1989)

Public collections

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lucia-nogueira-5755

Related organisations

Central School of Art and Design (student)
Chelsea College of Art (student)

Selected exhibitions

Lucia Nogueira: Smoke and Drawings, Granary Gallery, Berwick-upon-Tweed, Scotland (2023)
Lucia Nogueira, Annely Juda Fine Art, London (2016)
Aleana Egan, Lucia Nogueira, Bojan Šarčević, Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh (2014)
Lucia Nogueira: Mischief, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (2011)
Lucia Nogueira: Drawings, Drawing Room, London (2005)
Material Culture, group exhibition, Hayward Gallery, London (1997)
Lucia Nogueira, Camden Arts Centre, London (1994)
Lucia Nogueira, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (1993)
Smoke, Chisenhale Gallery, London (1990)
Lucia Nogueira at the Mario Flecha Gallery, London (1990)
Promises Promises, group exhibition, Serpentine Gallery, London (1989)
Lucia Nogueira, Carlile Gallery, Islington, London (1988)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lucia Nogueira]