Érica Magalhães

Muriaé – MG, 1983

Érica Magalhães is an artist from Minas Gerais with an MA degree in Visual Arts from the State University of the State of Rio de Janeiro. Currently living and working in São Paulo, she works mainly with sculpture and installation.

The starting point for her artworks is the materials themselves: concrete, rebar, and everyday objects of porcelain or glass. By joining them, the artist challenges the viewer both by eliminating the limitations and pre-established associations related to each of these materials, as well as by betting on the re-signifying that this new materiality – created by the joining of these un-mixable elements – gains through interactions, conflicts, collisions, and affective and cultural relations amongst them.  

“Concrete and porcelain, for example, seem to neutralize each other due to the shock of their very distinct properties. The ornamental shapes of the porcelain, when fused with the formal objectivity of the concrete cuboids, also suggest contrasts, formal and metonymic shocks, and tensions in the pieces”, she says. A potential for synthesis emerges, thus, from this junction, and serves “the understanding of the fragile imprecise existence amidst the rigid constructions”, she says.

Érica Magalhães has participated in numerous exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro, of which some of the most recent are: “Casa Carioca” at the Art Museum of Rio (2020); “Bordas da Ausência” at the gallery Galeria Aymoré (2020); “À construção” at Solar dos Abacaxis (2020); “Esqueleto” at Paço Imperial (2019); and, at the Municipal Art Center Hélio Oiticica, “Formação” (2018). 

Artworks:

“Fênix” [“Phoenix”] (2018). Sculpture made with concrete, rebar, porcelain doll. Dimensions: 22cm x 09cm x 50 cm.

“Boneca #1” [“Doll #1”] (2019). Sculpture made with glass, steel, machined aluminum. Dimensões: 50cm x 170cm x 50 cm.

“sem título” [“untitled”] (2017). Sculpture made with concrete, satin ribbon. Varied dimensions.