Rivane Neuenschwander

Rivane Neuenschwander has developed a unique practice within the vein of Brazilian conceptualism to investigate the role of chance, control and collaboration. Incorporating influences from Brazil's rich history of art movements over the past fifty years, Neuenschwander has become widely regarded for her ephemeral, engaging work that explores narratives about language, nature, geography, the passing of time and social interactions. To do so, the artist frequently employs external forces – both people and natural processes – to produce a series of dynamic, autonomous results. At times her works are interactive, involving viewers in spontaneous and participatory actions, while at others they are the direct results of empirical processes or experiments. All, however, work to expand the collective consciousness by emphasizing certain phenomena that are often overlooked, yet when finally seen, surprisingly remarkable.

Download Artist's CV

Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and currently lives and works in São Paulo. She received a BFA from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil in 1993 and completed her MFA at the Royal College of Art in London.

Winner of the Yanghyun Prize in South Korea in 2013 and shortlisted for the Guggenheim Museum’s Hugo Boss Prize in 2004, the artist has exhibited her work internationally throughout the past twenty years. In 2010, the New Museum in New York presented Rivane Neuenschwander: A Day Like Any Other, a major survey exhibition that traveled to the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum in St. Louis, followed by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona, Miami Art Museum, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin through 2012.

Other important solo exhibitions include Brasil de susto e sonho: um panorama na obra de Rivane Neuenschwander at Itaú Cultural, São Paulo, Brazil (2025), Tangolomango at Instituto Inhotim, Brazil (2024-26), dream.lab at Kinder Kunst Labor for Contemporary Art, St. Pölten, Austria (2024-25), Wild Seeds at Serralves Museum, Porto, Portugal (2022-23), knife does not cut fire at Liechtenstein Kunstmuseum (2021), Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue with Cao Guimarães at Tate Modern, London (ongoing), O Nome do Medo (The Name of Fear) at MAR, Museu de Arte do Rio, Rio de Janeiro (2017), The Name of Fear at Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015), Mal-Entendidos at Museu de Arte Moderna de Sao Paulo, Brazil (2014), At a Certain Distance at Malmo Konsthall, Sweden (2010), Rivane Neuenschwander: Joe Carioca atSt. Louis Art Museum, Missouri, MO (2007), Forum 60: Rivane Neuenschwander atCarnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA (2007), Black Box: Rivane Neuenschwander atHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2007), Superficial Resemblance at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2003), To/From: Rivane Neuenschwander atthe Walker Arts Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002), Spell at Portikus, Frankfurt (2001).

The artist’s work was also featured in the 55th Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, along with group shows at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany, Kunsthalle Mainz, Germany, The Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Kunsthalle Wein in Austria, Stedelijk Museum in The Netherlands, and Moderna Museet in Stockholm, among many others.

Currently Neuenschwander’s work can be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Modern, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporânea in Brazil, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdamn, The Israel Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Sao Paulo, Seattle Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center, among others.

Rivane Neuenschwander: The fever, the sewing box and a ghost.

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

May 9 - June 20, 2015

Neuenschwander explores themes of childhood, memory and narrative through works across a diverse range of mediums including installation, video, painting and embroidery.

Rivane Neuenschwander: Other Stories and Stories of Others

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

September 7 - October 14, 2006

Informed by the Neoconcrete movement of the 1970s in Brazil, Neuenschwander transforms the idea of narrative from an abstraction into concrete manifestations, creating discrete objects to be observed, considered, analyzed...