LAURA VINCI, FLOWS
Captions and audio descriptions of the works featured in the exhibition
1.
Ainda Viva, 2007
Marble and apples
Marble table: 52 × 150 × 600 cm; approx. 300 apples and 21 marble cubes (varied shapes, 12 × 12 × 12 cm)
Table: Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP.
Cubes: Ana Amaral Ferraz (4 pieces), Gruenewald Reisen (3 pieces), Guilherme Sobral (1 piece), Lina and Jaky Diwan (4 pieces), Otavio Roberti Macedo (5 pieces), Suzana Cha (4 pieces) – São Paulo – SP
On and under a large marble table, real apples remain on display throughout the exhibition period, while their scent can be perceived from afar. The apples decay in their own time, intensifying the fragrance in the room.
2.
Corrente, 2024
Gold-plated brass
273 × 8 × 8 cm
Ricardo Brito Collection, Ribeirão Preto – SP
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3.
TRIZ, 2024
Stainless steel, smoke machines, brass and chrome-plated brass
Variable dimensions
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
The first insight for the piece “TRIZ” came in May 2023 when I saw the painting The Temptations of Saint Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch, which belongs to the National Museum of Ancient Art in Lisbon. In it, there are figures composed of a sort of “cone-noses” that emit smoke. With this image in mind, I sought to construct cones that would evoke those figures. That’s when I found the musical instrument factory “HS,” which was tasked with building these structures. To complete the work, I needed to create a mechanism capable of emitting smoke from within, so I contacted my partners Marília Teixeira and Daniel Zagati, who helped me bring this mechanism to life.
4.
Full Half Hour I, II, III e IV, 2014
Glass, aluminum, and sand
Variable dimensions
Marina Linhares Collection, São Paulo – SP
In Full Half Hour I, II, III, and IV, the different scales and shapes in the sculpture reveal varied dilations of time. The last piece in this series is located at the museum exit.
5.
Untitled, 2011/2025
Aluminum and marble dust
50 × 50 × 50 cmArtist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
From a single module, repeated in different positions, patterns are formed. The joining of the pieces plays with the viewer’s gaze in a loop of internal and external forms.
6.
Corrente, 2024
Gold-plated brass
384 × 9 × 9 cm
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
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7.
Todas as Graças, 2018
Spun brass
7 pieces Ø 60 cm, 7 pieces Ø 30 cm
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
“With All the Graces, Laura Vinci challenges and provokes us to go beyond visual triviality in order to decode the temporality imprinted on surfaces, restoring memory to the body and stories to art.
‘All this history is contained in my Graces,’ says Laura, seeing in the images of art, above all, images of images—condensations of time.
[...]
The enigma that endures in these works refers to the inherent tension in art—between matter and light, the perceptible and the legible, opacity and transparency, ‘raw material presence and a discourse encoding a story.’
But what are these ‘images’ that tangle nature and history?
Beyond the moment in which they are experienced, image-works have an afterlife that stretches past the impression; they unfold into sequences of other images, overlap, and associate in networks.
What is memory if not a compilation of images? Once they are ‘loaded with time,’ says Agamben, saturated images ‘become history.’
There is, therefore, a life of images to be understood—a temporality to be unraveled—which the artist explores with keen awareness of an unknown nature underlying the physical world and the memory of art.”
— Virgínia Aragonés
8.
Morro Mundo, 2017
Borosilicate glass, smoke machines, and metal props
Variable dimensions
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
“The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé said he smoked to put a bit of smoke between himself and the world. As if smoke were a kind of lens or scale, a hut or anti-hut, but always something in between.
Laura Vinci, whose work has always been sensitive to different states and vibrations of matter, knows, however, that everything is smoke, haze, mist, fog. And mist is a spiritual contour. There is no outside of the mist.
‘Diadorim was my mist,’ wrote Rosa.
Everything mist-nothing, says Ecclesiastes.
All humans, by virtue of being human, are in the mist, whether they want to be or not, said Vilém Flusser.
A mist that, here in World Hill, has high tides and low tides.
And it subjects us to constant shifts in perspective. It is when the matter of the world dances around us in waves.
Whoever says haze, says threshold.
But in the beginning, concretely, it is the glass tubing—this enemy of mystery—which already displays the smoke, still contained, almost restrained, like an animal ready to leap, until it is finally released by the activation of motion sensors and coils its body through every corner of space, engulfing it and engulfing us.”
— Carlito Azevedo
9.
Corrente, 2024
Gold-plated brass
384 × 9 × 9 cm
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
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10.
Solitárias, 2025
Gold-plated brass
Variable dimensions
Produced with support from the ProAC – PNAB 25/2024 grant, MuBE, São Paulo – SP
Solitaries are suspended by thin chains directly connected to the upper structure of the gallery, like relics from a future in which the singular eccentricities of our Earth have ceased to be noticed.
The work invites the viewer to see themselves as part of this pulsing environment, where their own body is present in the continuum.
Among the group, some Solitaries rotate on their own axis.
11.
Máquina do mundo, 2005
Metal, motor, plastic, and 10 tons of marble dust
Variable dimensions
Inhotim Collection, Brumadinho – MG
In World Machine, the transfer of powdered matter is carried out horizontally and through the machine—this new component, which I borrowed from Drummond’s poem.
In fact, it took shape because of the poem—my World Machine nearly transports each grain of marble dust individually, in a mineral silence, as if it were carrying back and forth the history of sculpture in powder form.
All that marble may hold, in its pile, possible eternal sculptures.
And perhaps, grain by grain, it reflects on our fragile transience.
12.
Pêndulos, 2024
Motor, brass, and aluminum
Variable dimensions
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
13.
Duas Graças, 2016
Marble
Ø 100 × 110 cm
Silvia Velludo and Marcelo Guarnieri Collection, Ribeirão Preto – SP
In Greek mythology, the Three Graces were the goddesses of charm, beauty, and fertility. Daughters of Zeus and Hera, they were associated with Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Their most common names were Aglaea (Brightness), Thalia (She Who Makes Flowers Bloom), and Euphrosyne (Joy). They also appear in Roman mythology, linked to Venus.
This myth continued to be represented throughout art history: in Botticelli’s Primavera (that group of three goddesses on the left side of the painting), in a 1505 painting by Raphael, in Rubens’s Baroque works, and in Canova’s Neoclassical sculpture. At the beginning of Modernism, Maillol created his own Three Graces, and Rodin made a masculine version—the Three Shades—for the top of The Gates of Hell. The grace of Rodin’s Three Shades lies in the fact that the group is made from a single sculpture; because its torsion is so extraordinary, it gives the ensemble an incredibly rich sense of movement.
14.
No ar, 2010/2017
Misting system
Variable dimensions
MuBE Collection, São Paulo – SP
When I went to Australia for the second time, in 2004, I discovered a cold vaporization system that I immediately wished to use in my work.
I didn't make just one, but several — in Cuenca, Lisbon, Padua, and São Paulo.
The system is very simple: small spray nozzles, operating under high pressure, are activated by a pump that propels the water with such force that the droplets gain an unusual quality, somewhere between the gaseous and the liquid state.
15.
Sombra Grande, 2023
Espírito Santo marble
43 × 150 cm
Produced with support from the ProAC – PNAB 25/2024 grant, MuBE, São Paulo – SP
Based on an inversion of the usual drawing method, the Shadows emerged: three identical white forms displayed in parallel at opposing angles, offering different sensory experiences
16.
Untitled, 2014
150 marble pieces
53.2 × 13 × 7.9 cm each
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
From a single module, repeated in different positions, patterns are formed.
The joining of the pieces plays with the viewer’s gaze in a loop of internal and external forms.
17.
Pilarzinho, 2024
Marble
33.5 × 33.5 × 120 cm each
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
18.
Meninas, 2023
Yosemite Falls Quartzite
40.9 × Ø 100 cm
Artist’s collection, São Paulo – SP
The work Girls was born from a meeting that Marília Teixeira and I had with Flávia Madeira in her studio, during the time she was returning from Italy with her new jewelry pieces.
The spun forms that Flávia used in creating her new collection inspired the creation of these works.
The title Girls is a tribute to both of them, Flávia and Marília.
