Renata Lucas

Using basic building materials (plywood, bricks, concrete), Renata Lucas manipulates urban spaces and architecture to intensify the tension between inside and outside, public and private, past and present. Lucas’ practice is a critical interpretation of how our built environment determines actions, behavior and social relationships, and by extension, society’s dependency on the preservation of prescribed definitions of space, property and order. In her work, Lucas imagines a space where these barriers break down, where the possibility of deconstructing these boundaries—through even as simple a symbolic gesture as tearing down a wall—might result in a different social dynamic. By offering an alternative spatial imagination, one that brings into consideration malleability, manipulation and play, Lucas provokes the possibility of new subjective and collective engagement within our built environment…

Brazilian artist Renata Lucas specialises in interventions in the physical space of the gallery or its surroundings, so that visitors, residents or passers-by experience a familiar environment anew. For her work for The World as a stage, entitled The Visitor (2007), she has planted a section of a forest in the formal garden situated between the museum and the river…

60 Seconds with the Artist