Laura Lima, based on movement, body and matter in 2025

2025 has been a pivotal year for contemporary art, marked by the fusion of technology, immersive experiences, and social commentary. The rise of digital art, sensory installations, and narratives about identity, memory, and sustainability have defined the main global trends.

Iconic exhibitions such as Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms , the major David Hockney retrospective, and Suzanne Valadon's historical revisiting have confirmed the interest in revisiting established figures through contemporary lenses. At the same time, art fairs like Frieze London, Art Basel Miami Beach, and ART X Lagos reinforced the global and diverse nature of the art ecosystem.

The year also stood out for its support of emerging artists and historically marginalized voices, as well as for the intersection of art, fashion, and pop culture. Overall, 2025 leaves behind a more open, hybrid, and participatory art scene, laying the groundwork for a new creative era in the coming years.

Among the most prominent artists is Laura Lima, a contemporary Brazilian artist born in 1971 in Governador Valadares (Minas Gerais) and based in Rio de Janeiro. She is known for developing a body of work that defies conventional classifications such as performance, installation, or sculpture. Her work reflects on the materiality of living bodies (human, animal, and plant) and seeks to articulate a unique visual language that transcends traditional representations, integrating the audience, time, and space as inseparable components of the work.

Her work explores how presence, direct experience, and uncertainty can transform our understanding of art, proposing situations that invite us to reconsider the relationship between artwork, viewer, and environment. In 2025, Brazilian artist Laura Lima (Brazil, 1971) consolidated her international standing with a series of exhibitions and interventions that reaffirmed her position as one of the most singular voices in contemporary art. Her work, situated in a hybrid territory between installation, performance, and sculpture, proposes experiences in which the body—human or otherwise—movement, and energy become artistic material.

One of the highlights of the year is Literal Ballet, presented between April 24 and May 30, 2025, at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York. In this installation, Lima transforms the exhibition space into a mechanical choreography: suspended objects move via pulleys and energy systems activated by a cyclist, resulting in a literal “ballet” in which there are no human dancers, but rather action, rhythm, and tension. The work questions traditional hierarchies between subject and object and proposes a reflection on work, physical effort, and invisible relationships of dependency.

During the European summer, the artist created a site-specific intervention at the Panthéon in Paris, inaugurated on June 7, 2025, as part of the Brazil-France Season 2025. The installation engages with the monumentality of the building and its historical significance, integrating sculptural elements that contrast the organic and the mineral. In this context, Lima's work activates a contemporary interpretation of the space, challenging the architectural solemnity with subtle gestures and materials that introduce movement and fragility.

That same year, Laura Lima also participated in the Boston Public Art Triennial, which took place between May 22 and October 31, 2025. Her presence in this public art triennial reinforced a key dimension of her practice: the ability to activate open and urban environments, shifting the artistic experience out of the traditional institutional space and engaging in a direct relationship with the everyday viewer.

Although already outside the 2025 calendar, it is worth noting that these projects anticipate a major solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London, planned for early 2026, which confirms the continuity and expansion of his work on the international circuit.

Throughout these works, Laura Lima insists on a poetics where the artwork is not merely observed, but unfolds in real time. Her practice dissolves the boundaries between object, body, and action, inviting the viewer to inhabit a constantly transforming space. In an art world increasingly defined by the digital and the immaterial, Lima proposes a radically physical experience, where movement, effort, and presence become language.