Laura Lima: The Drawing Drawing

27 Jan-29 Mar 2026

Overview

A new exhibition by Brazilian multidisciplinary artist Laura Lima (b. 1971, Minas Gerais).

Marking a significant introduction of her work to UK audiences, the exhibition will unfold across the Upper and Lower Galleries in a series of installations involving sculpture, movement, live performers and public participation. At the heart of The Drawing Drawing will be a new interactive sculptural installation of the same name which reimagines the traditional framework of the life drawing class. 

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.

Taking place in the Lower Galleries, Lima’s new commission The Drawing Drawing will upend the traditional format of the life drawing class, blurring the lines between audience and artwork. 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.

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, the work offers a surrealistic jolt from the ordinary. In Upper Galleries, a scene related to Balé Literal will transform notions of 'drawing' with a playful object dancing through space –⁠ at once familiar and strange.

As a whole, the exhibition 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.