SANTANDER.- Of Day or Night is the first exhibition in Spain dedicated to Solange Pessoa (Ferros, Brazil, 1961), an artist internationally recognized for her multidisciplinary practice, encompassing sculpture, painting, video, performance, installation, and drawing.
Her work explores themes connected to nature, memory, the body, spirituality, and the cycles of life, weaving together a range of local references such as Brazilian modernism, colonial Baroque, and Indigenous cosmologies with influences from Land Art, Arte Povera, Surrealism, and prehistoric symbolism.
Her work has deep roots in the landscape and context of Minas Gerais, a region of extraordinary natural wealth that has historically been one of Brazil’s key mining centers. Through the use of organic and mineral materials, Pessoa establishes a direct relationship with this land and culture, evoking processes of metamorphosis and an oneiric engagement with landscape and matter.
Curated by Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection at Centro Botín, this exhibition brings together a selection of works that connect her early research and works from the 1990s with the ambitious formal developments of those same investigations in the present decade. The works come from the artist’s studio as well as institutional and private collections, in addition to two bespoke installations created specifically for the architecture and setting of Centro Botín.
The exhibition’s title refers to Pessoa’s universe, where opposites do not operate as fixed categories but instead generate a space of ambiguity and contemplation. In her work, the corporeal and the transcendent, darkness and light, the human and the animal cease to function as opposites and merge in a sublime way. The spiritual never appears separate from the physical but rather emerges from matter itself—from its textures, intensity, brightness, and opacity.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication featuring texts by Maria Berbara, PhD in Art History and a researcher specializing in art history and visual culture with a focus on the Iberian world and Brazil, and Ángel Calvo Ulloa, as well as a contribution by the exhibition’s curator, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Director of Exhibitions and the Collection at Centro Botín.
Solange Pessoa (b.1961, Ferros, Brazil) lives and works in Belo Horizonte. Her selected solo institutional exhibitions include Catch the Sun with Your Hand, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2025); Pilgrim Fields, Tramway, Glasgow (2025); Solange Pessoa, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Bregenz (2023); Longilonge, Ballroom Marfa, Marfa (2019); Metaflor-Metaflora, Museu Mineiro, Belo Horizonte (2013); Museu de Arte da Pampulha, Belo Horizonte (2008); Museu da Inconfidência, Ouro Preto (2000); Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte (1995); and Centro Cultural São Paulo, São Paulo (1992). Pessoa has participated in numerous group exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles, Barbican Centre, London (2024); The Milk of Dreams, 59th International Biennale di Venezia, Venice (2022); Reclaim the Earth, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Living Worlds, Fondation Cartier, Lille (2022); Invenção de Origem, Estação Pinacoteca, São Paulo (2018).
