LONDON.- In January 2026, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), on The Mall, London, will present a new exhibition by Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Laura Lima (b. 1971, Minas Gerais). Since the mid-90s, Lima has become recognised for her subversive artworks which explore the relationship between bodies and their environment, questioning social expectations and accepted hierarchies by staging live situations where people, objects and spaces interact in unconventional ways. From leading a cow onto Ipanema Beach in 1994 to her celebrated Balé Literal, which saw a ballet of objects dance through spaces from the streets of Rio to the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona on a system of pulleys, Lima’s distinctive practice challenges audiences and institutions to consider art as something which exceeds the boundaries of any one form — image, object, event, or performance — existing instead in the space between.

As Lima’s first solo exhibition in London, The Drawing Drawing marks a significant introduction of her work to UK audiences, in which she will present a series of performative installations across the ICA’s Upper and Lower Galleries. The exhibition will centre around a new commission which reconceives the traditional life drawing class, blurring the lines between audience and artwork.

Lima’s playful, sometimes anarchic disruption of established structures expands the definition of art and highlights the unseen work which sustains cultural institutions.

At the core of The Drawing Drawing will be an interactive sculptural installation that upends the traditional framework of the life drawing class. A cornerstone of Western artistic training since the Renaissance, life drawing centres the human figure, upholds drawing as a foundational discipline and promises mastery through faithful representation of perspective and anatomy. In Lima’s installation, ‘drawing’ is redefined as an expansive, conceptual proposition. Visitors will be invited to put pencil to paper in a life drawing class in which the core elements of the setting are recognisable, but any conventions of subject and object, of perspective and representation, mastery and value, are destabilised. In their place emerges a poetic exchange that reorients attention towards the dynamics between bodies.

On display throughout the building, discrete performative sculptural works from various stages of Lima’s surprising career will lay the conceptual groundwork for The Drawing Drawing installation. Also on view in the Lower Galleries will be Ascenseur, a work first conceived in 2013, involving a live performer partially visible to the public but separated by architecture. Like The Drawing Drawing it redefines the expectations of a visitor in a gallery space, offering a surrealistic jolt from the ordinary. The Upper Galleries will feature a scene related to Balé Literal that reimagines ‘drawing’ through a playful object dancing through the space – at once familiar and strange. The exhibition as a whole will be characterised by movement, poetic discovery and unpredictability. The Drawing Drawing and related performative installations, sculptural gestures and ephemeral actions will demand a shift in perception from the viewer; Lima explores the human experience in specific situations as choreographies of bodies, space, and the exchange between thought and matter.