Lucas Simões 1980
Exploring the failures of modernity and their ongoing repercussions, their work engages in a nuanced dialogue between materiality, the built environment, and its inhabitants. By subtly destabilizing the perceived certainty of structures, they reveal the fragility underlying seemingly rigid systems.
Lucas Simões (Catanduva, 1980) is a Brazilian artist based in São Paulo.
His works explores the limits and unpredictability of behavior of materials and the final results always spans between an act of research and a genuine art piece.
Concrete, paper, steel, foam, the most recurrent materials in Lucas Simões's work, find a direct origin in his background as architect and so does his approach to the artistic process, as part of his work can be seen as a critic to the failure of modern architecture.
His artistic career began before the architecture's studies and always coexisted until becoming his definitive path. Some of his works are permanently exhibited in public Brazilian collections such as the Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro, the MAC USP, (Museu de Arte Contemporânea da cidade de São Paulo), the ITAÚ collection of Brazilian photography, São Paulo, the CCSP (Centro Cultural São Paulo), São Paulo, and the IFF (Instituto Figueiredo Ferraz), Ribeirão Preto and some foreign collections, such as the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, USA and the Kablanc Otazu Foundation in Navarra, Spain.
Simões work has been displayed in solo exhibits at Museu de Arte Moderna Aloísio Magalhães in Recife, Brazil, at Caixa Cultural, both in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro and at Pivô Arte e Pesquisa in São Paulo.
His work also took part to various collective exhibition throughout the years; amongst them "Mil Bestias que Rugen: Dispositivos de exposición para una modernidad crítica", at Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporanea (CAAC) in Sevilla, Spain,[5] "Building Materials" at Hauser & Wirth Gallery, in Los Angeles[6] and "Acervo: Outras Abordagens" at Museu de Arte Contempoânea da USP (MAC USP), in São Paulo, all during 2017.
In 2013 his work was part of the show "Amor e ódio à Lygia Clark" at the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw,[7] Poland and of "Além da biblioteca" at Itocho Ayoama Art Square in Tokyo, Japan. In 2012 he took part to "Elogie Du vertige" at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, France and the year before to "Geração 00, a nova fotografia brasileira" at Sesc Belenzinho in São Paulo, Brazil.
He also participated to the 10th Bienal do Mercosul "Mensagens de Uma Nova América" in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2015 and partaken to "Imagine Brazil" in 2013, at Astrup Fearnley Museet in Oslo, Norway and in 2015 at D H C/ART Foundation for Contemporary Art in Quebec, Canada.