Bio
2024
Giovanna Gomes is a Brazilian visual artist whose practice unfolds at the intersection of ancestry, memory, environment, and abstraction. Born in the Northeast of Brazil, she draws upon Black and Northeastern heritage as both subject and method, translating lived experience into a visual language that insists on presence and resists erasure. Her work engages with the materiality of the world—stone, soil, water, glass, and urban surfaces—transforming them through color and form into radiant abstractions. These images are not descriptive documents but acts of invention: matter becomes metaphor, and texture becomes a site of imagination. In this process, Giovanna situates photography beyond its conventional function, opening it to the realm of the poetic and the political. Her practice embodies political abstraction: a mode where natural and urban fragments are reconfigured into chromatic fields that expose the tensions between visibility and invisibility, history and future, fragility and resilience. This abstraction is not an escape from reality but a confrontation with it: foregrounding territories and bodies often relegated to the margins while asserting their centrality in a global artistic discourse. Giovanna’s work thus positions abstraction as a critical tool for reimagining presence, belonging, and ecology. In her images, the environment is not backdrop but agent; each surface carries the weight of memory and the possibility of transformation. Her practice expands the possibilities of photography, proposing it as a field where history and landscape converge, and where vision itself becomes a form of resistance.