Claudia Lima was born in 1956 and lived in Rio during the dictatorship. Her first steps in the world of the arts were taken at the city’s Museum of Modern Art, which was then

a hive of political opposition activity. The continental-scale project of building a new capital, Brasília, deep in the centre of the country, had been encharged to Óscar

Neimayer since 1957.

 

Between 1964 and 1970, he participated in various of the collective exhibitions annually organized by the Museum and was awarded successive first prizes.

In 1979, she graduated in law and moved to Lisbon the following year. She took the painting and design courses run by AR-CO, a school that, in parallel with the fine arts,

has been a pioneer of both design and other decorative art forms such as jewelry.

 

Granted a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship in 1983-84, Cláudia attended the École Nationale D’Art Décoratif in Aubusson in the following academic year. She has

contributed ever since towards various individual and collective exhibitions whether in Lisbon or internationally.

 

In 1984, the art critic Fernando de Azevedo described her in the following terms: The world of the artist is a world of happiness, I would dare say of inner worlds that tell us

of affections and human experiences. Inner worlds communicating with trees, flowers, with the sun and the sky…The design is as simple as a landmark, the light is intense, on occasion geometric…

 

Cristina Azevedo Tavares, in 1995, made this comment: Cláudia Lima tapestries inform us of a rich sensitivity that fundamentally emerges out of of two poles: on the one hand, the presence of an infantile and adolescent world through the paintings that serve as tapestry templates, revealing a unique type of representation; on the other hand, the learnings gained in both Brazil and Europe. Thus has Cláudia Lima internalized representative procedures stemming from the teachings of Ivan Serpa and a Matissian conception of forms and colors, in a structured affirmation of bidimensionality.

 

In 1996, Claudia Lima completed her first installation and correspondingly engaging with tri-dimensionality. Madalena Braz Teixeira put forward this analysis of her

Carnival of Serpentines, in which the artist reflects on an essential event in Brazilian culture: the installation neither begins nor ends instead constituting a project of

constantly returning from the primitive to the artificial, passing by the unfurling reflections of mirrors. Reality multiplies in a performance of great visual impact. These

approach the festivities of carnival and extraordinarily in the Carnival of Serpentines.

 

The Lisbon hosted Expo-98, themed on the oceans, provided another international event in which the artist participated, this time on the invitation of the Portuguese Language Commonwealth. In the words of Selma Calazans Rodrigues: there are seven peoples, seven desires, seven anguishes, seven hopes, seven ways of speaking a single language: the Lusophones, Portugal, Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde

and Sao Tomé e Príncipe.

 

These seven members were joined by Timor-Lorosae when the country gained independence from Indonesia in 2002. Claudia Lima imagined an installation, Waves of Lusophone, on the theme of Voyage. Madalena Braz Teixeira provided this description: the installation develops along a corridor that, duly planned, takes on an L-shape, which well reflects the homage that artists seek to bestow on Lusophone and on the discourse binding the peoples of the Portuguese language community.

 

The space… is closed off and covered by a ceiling from which metallic threads are suspended along with others in polychrome plastic that generate aerial patterns evocative of waves on the ocean…Conflict in the former-Yugoslavia, taking place on the European continent, at a distance of just two and a half days drive was within the proximity of a continental neighbor to Claudia Lima, understandably given her origins in one of the world’s largest countries.

 

José Luís Porfírio wrote in 2001: a memory of the two dimensions to the wall, and from there, in conjunction with the vertical monolithic apparition, also presences/illusions,

these pieces bear witness to a long path travelled, deep disquiet and much research, revealing a sensitive thinking, inseparable from material, from the hand and the body… And thereby these objects surge forth; it would be hollow to classify them, sculptures? Painted, highlighted textile volumes? Such an identification would hold no value beyond indicating the cross-referencing or the “Networked”, a designation certainly preferred by Claudia Lima, materials and awarenesses that make up her current work…

Estou permanentemente me renovando, tentando atingir algo novo que exprima o meu interior e que fale por si mesmo como objecto de arte.

 

 

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Nós, Homens, criamos as nossas mordaças! Aliás, o sentido do MASTIGAR tem relação com o estratificar das prisões, assim como o regurgitar das cordas simboliza o nosso próprio drama, que é essa guerra interior na libertação dessas prisões. E a passagem de uma prisão para outra.

 

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