Juliana Cerqueira Leite – 2014 Residency Artist
Brazil
Bio
Juliana Cerqueira Leite is a Brazilian artist based in Brooklyn. She studied sculpture in London, at Chelsea College of Art and then the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, where she graduated from the MFA Sculpture program in 2006.
Monumental or delicately proportioned her works investigate how time and physical action is captured in matter to generate form. Leite aims to reveal new shapes while mining the history of representations of the body as active object and embodied subject from recognizable form to the edge of abstraction. The objects, drawings, photography, performance and video work that make up Leite’s practice are process-led, continually revealing their past engagement with the artists’ body. Emerging from an interest in how tactile, temporal and spatial physical experience is stored in memory and the mental body-map, her work is determined by specific action-schemes, repetitive choreography and a curiosity about the behavior of conventional art materials.
She exhibits her work internationally since 2007 with recent group shows at the Saatchi Gallery, London; the 4th Marrakech Biennial; DUVE Gallery, Berlin; Art Public, Art Basel Miami Beach; and recent solo shows at Galleria Lorcan O’Neil, Rome; Casa Triângulo, São Paulo, Brazil; and the AIR Gallery, New York. Juliana was a NYFA/NYSCA funded artist in residence at Sculpture Space, Utica, and artist in residence at Foundation Armando Alvares Penteado in São Paulo, Brazil and The Banff Arts Center, Canada. She is recipient of the 2006 Kenneth Armitage Sculpture Prize and the 2010-11 A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship in New York. She is also an active curator with recent projects at the Dumbo Arts Center and St. Cecilia’s Convent, both in Brooklyn, and at Yinka Shonibare’s Guest Projects in London.