Sonia Andrade

Sonia Andrade (born 1935) is a Brazilian feminist and visual artist. She was one of the pioneers in video art in Brazil. Her video works use appropriation, humor, and political commentary to break down accepted visual codes. Andrade’s body of work includes drawings, photography, objects,installation and mulit-channel video to achieve what she calls “the most important aspect of art-the relationship between the spectator and the object.” Some of her earliest video work dates from the mid-1970’s. In these provocative pieces, Andrade deformed her face with threads, fixed her hand to a table with wire and nails, and removed body hairs with scissors. Later work consisted of assemblages of found objects, as well as drawings, photographs, sculptures, neon art and installations. Hydrogrammas is her most famous piece of work which consist of hundreds of small objects that assemble into a sculpture, which was eventually displayed in National Museum of Fine Arts and later at the Museum of Contemporary Art of São Paulo.